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MAN AND THE UNIVERSE
BOOKS BY SIR OLIVER LODGE
Raymond: or Life and Death

The Survival of Man
Man and the Universe
Reason and Belief
Christopher
The War and After
Modern Problems
NEW YORK: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

MAN AND THE
UNIVERSE
BY
SIR OLIVER LODGE, LL.D., D.Sc, F.R.S,

Author of "Raymond," "The Survival of Man," etc.
NEW ^'VS^ YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
7/^
^ l>
COPTBIQHT, 1908,
By GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY)
All Rights Reserved
CoPTBIQHT, 1920,
Bt GEORGE H.^ DORAN COMPANY
FOBMEBLT PdBUSHED UnDEB THE TiTLB

SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY
Mft« I8r920
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
©aA565236
i-
PREFATORY NOTE TO AMERICAN

EDITION
This book appeared originally under the title "Sci-
ence and Immortality," but this represents only a
portion of its theme, and is inadequate. Its true title,
by which it is known in England, is now restored to it
— "Man and the Universe." For it is a comprehen-
sive survey of many things of high importance, and
constitutes the author's most important work on any
rehgious theme. The other two of his religious books
are "Reason and Belief" and "The Substance of
Faith" the last being thrown into the form of a cate-
;
chism for the use of Parents and Teachers, and both

books being intended to help those who find a diffi-
culty in answering questions propounded by eager
children.
The present work more ambitious, and tries to
is
deal with the interaction of Science and Theology

generally. It begins with a statement of the Conflict
—a conflict which raged fiercely in the latter half of
—
the Nineteenth Century and it formulates the antag-
onistic views uncompromisingly in the first chapter.
The second chapter indicates a Reconciliation of the
opposing views; while the third chapter justifies a
reasonable scientific attitude toward the JNIiraculous
element in religion, an element which has often in-
volved thoughtful people in needless difficulties.
A section on Ecclesiastical matters follows, urging
—
vi PREFATORY NOTE
greater freedom, less intolerance, and a heartier spirit
of united effort among all those who profess and call
themselves Christians. In particular it is argued that
many good men are kept out of Clerical Office at —
least in the Anghcan Church —by the tests and vows
which have come down to us from less enlightened
times, and which might be so much more effective and
acceptable if dead formularies were made simple, real
and living.
A section on the Immortality of the Soul and the
Permanence of Personality follows.
And then comes a careful treatment of the relations
between Science and Christianity. The ambitious
and difficult subjects of Sin and the Atonement are'
dealt with humbly and seriously and the concluding
;
chapters emphasize both the Material element and the

Divine element in Christianity. In particular the au-
thor would draw the attention of all who read the
book to the concluding portion entitled "Ecce Deus."
In the hope that this book may be received in Amer-
ica as it has been received in England, and may be
found helpful by serious and thoughtful people,
perturbed as many are by the period of scientific dis-
—
covery through which they have lived, the author
commends this as his most soHd contribution to a re-
formulation and confirmation of religious belief, and
to that reinterpretation of ancient formulas which in
every age of progress is essential to vitality and to the
reception of fresh developments of revealed truth.
Oliver J. Lodge.
New York,
February, 1920.
CONTENTS
SECTION I
SCIENCE AND FAITH

PAGE
Chapter 1. THE OUTSTANDING CONTROVERSY
BETWEEN SCIENCE AND FAITH. 1
The Teachings of Orthodox Science and of Orthodox

Religion contrasted.
Chapter 2. THE RECONCILIATION BETWEEN

SCIENCE AND FAITH 23
The Doctrines of Uniformity, Immanence, Agency,
and Control, emphasised
Chapter 3. RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND MIRACLE. . 48
Meaning of Miracle —Arguments concerning the Mi-
raculous — Law and Guidance — Miracle and
Science— Miracle and Religion— Human Ex-
perience.
SECTION II
CORPORATE WORSHIP AND SERVICE

Chapter 4. THE ALLEGED INDIFFERENCE OF
LAYMEN TO RELIGION. ... 77
A brief Essay on the Neglect of Church Attendance.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Chapter 5. UNION AND BREADTH 86
A Plea for Essential Unity amid Formal Difference
in a National Church.
Chapter 6. A REFORMED CHURCH AS AN ENGINE

OF PROGRESS 112
The Power of a truly comprehensive National
Church.
Chapter 7. SOME SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS RE-

FORM. . 126
SECTION III
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

Chapter 8. Part I. THE TRANSITORY AND THE
PERMANENT 143
Chapter 9. Part II. THE PERMANENCE OF PER-

SONALITY .... 162
SECTION IV
SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY
Chapter 10. SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS THE RE-IN-
TERPRETATION OF CHRISTIAN
DOCTRINE 197
Treating of the Atonement and of Regeneration, with
a Criticism of the Doctrine of Vicarious Pun-
ishment.
Chapter 11. SIN, SUFFERING, AND WRATH. . . 218

A Sequel to the preceding.
CONTENTS
PA6B
Chapter 12. Part I. THE MATERIAL ELEMENT IN
CHRISTIANITY 249
(1) Correspondence of Spiritual and Material; (2)
The Resurrection of the Body; (3) The Res-
urrection of Christ.
Chapter 13. Part II.THE DIVINE ELEMENT IN

CHRISTIANITY 272
(The Meaning and Importance of the Doctrine of the
Divinity of Christ, or the Humanity of God.)
(4) Christianity and History; (5) Varieties of Chris-
tianity; (6) Ecce Deus.
SECTION I— SCIENCE AND FAITH
SCIENCE AND FAITH
CHAPTER I
THE OUTSTANDING CONTROVERSY
widely recognised at the present day that the

is
ITmodern spirit of scientific inquiry has in the main
exerted a wholesome influence upon Theology, clear-
ing itof much encumbrance of doubtful doctrine,
freeing it from slavery to the literal accuracy of his-
torical records, and reducing the region of the mirac-

ulous or the incredible, with which it used to be almost
conterminous, to a comparatively small area.
iThis influence is likely to continue as true science
advances, but by no means follows that the nature
it
of the benefit will always be that of a clearing and

unloading process. There must come a time when
such a process has gone far enough, and when some
positive contribution may be expected. Whether
such a time has now arrived or not is clearly open to
question, but I think be admitted that ortho-
it will
dox science at present, though it shows some sign of
abstaining from virulent criticism of religious creeds,
is still a long way from contributing in any degree
to their support; nor are its followers ready to admit
that they have as yet gone too far, if even far enough,
in the negative direction. No doubt both sides would
2 SCIENCE AND FAITH
allow that the highest Science and the truest Theology

must ultimately be mutually consistent, and harmo-
nious; but they are far from presenting that ap-
pearance at present. The term "Theology," as or-
dinarily used, necessarily signifies nothing ultimate
or divine ; it signifies only the present state of human
knowledge on theological subjects. And similarly
the term "Science," if correspondingly employed,
represents no fetish to be worshipped blindly as abso-
lute truth, but merely the present state of human
knowledge on subjects within its grasp, together with
the practical consequences deducible from such knowl-
edge in the opinion of the average scientific man: it
usually connotes what may be called orthodox science,
— the orthodox science of the present day, as set
forth by its professed exponents, and as indicated by
the general atmosphere or setting in which figures
in every branch of knowledge are now regarded by
cultivated men.
It may be objected that there is no definite body of
doctrine which can be classed as orthodox science ; and
it is true that there is no formulated creed but I sug-
;
gest that there is more nearly an orthodox science

than there is an orthodox theology. Professors of
theology differ among themselves in a rather con-
spicuous manner; and even in that branch of it with
which alone most Englislimen are familiar, viz. Chris-
tian Theology, there are differences of opinion on ap-
parently important issues, as is evidenced by the
existence of Sects, ranging from Unitarians on the
one side, to Greek and Roman Catholics on the other.
THE OUTSTANDING CONTROVERSY S
In marked, controversies
science, sectarianism is less
rage chiefly round matters of detail, and on all im-
portant issues its professors are agreed. This gen-
eral consensus of opinion on the part of experts, a
general consensus which the public are willing enough
to acquiesce in, and adopt as far as they can under-
stand it, is what I mean by the term "science as now
understood," or, for brevity, "modern science."
Similarly, by "religious doctrine" we shall mean
the general consensus of theologians so far as they
are in agreement, especially perhaps the general con-
sensus of Christian theologians; ignoring as far
as possible the presumably minor points on which
they differ, and eliminating everything manifestly
below the moral level of dogma generally acceptable
at the present day.
Now it must, I think, be admitted that the modern
scientific atmosphere, in spite of much that is whole-
some and nutritious, exercises a sort of blighting in-
fluence upon religious ardour. At any rate the great
saints or seers have as a rule not been eminent for
their acquaintance with exact scientific knowledge,
but on the contrary, have felt a distrust and a dislike
of that uncompromising quest for cold hard truth
in which the leaders of science are engaged; while on
the other hand, the leaders of science have shown an
aloofness from, if not a hostility towards, the theoret-
ical aspects of religion. In fact, it may be held that
the general drift or atmosphere of modern science
is adverse to the highest religious emotion, because
unconvinced of the reality of many of the occurrences
4 SCIENCE AND FAITH
upon which such an exalted must be

state of feeling
based, if it is to be anything more than a wave of
transient enthusiasm.
Nevertheless, we must admit that among men
of science, there must be many now living, who
accept fully the facts and implications of science,
who accept also the creeds of the Church, and who do
not keep the two sets of ideas in watertight com-
partments of their minds, but do distinctly perceive
a reconciling and fusing element.
If we proceed to ask what is this reconciling ele-
ment, we find that it is neither science nor theology,
but that it is either philosophy or poetry. By aid
of philosophy, or by aid of poetry, a great deal can
be accomplished. !Mind and matter may be then no
longer two, but one; this material universe may then
become the living garment of God; gross matter may
be regarded as a mere appearance, a mode of appre-
hending an idealistic cosmic reality, in which we really
live and move and have our being the whole of exist-
;
ence can become infused and suffused with immanent

Deity.
No would then be necessary between
reconciliation
and the material, between the laws of
the spiritual
Nature and the will of God, because the two would
be but aspects of one all-comprehensive pantheistic
entity.
All may possibly be in some
this sort true, but it is
not science as now understood. It is no more science

tban are the creeds of the Churches. It is a guess,
an intuition, —an inspiration perhaps, —but it is not
;
THE OUTSTANDING CONTROVERSY 5
a link in a chain of assured and reasoned knowledge

it can no more be clearly formulated in words, or
clearly apprehended in thought, than can any of the
high and lofty conceptions of rehgion. It is, in fact,
far more akin to rehgion than to science. It is no
solution of the knotty entanglement, but a soaring
above it; it is a reconciliation in eoccelsis.
Minds which can habitually rise to it are, ipso facto^

essentially rehgious, and are exercising their religious
functions they have flown off the dull earth of exact
;
knowledge into an atmosphere of faith.

But if this flight be possible, especially if it be ever
possible to minds engaged in a daily round of scien-
tific teaching and investigation, how can it be said
that the atmosphere of modern science and the

atmosphere of religious faith are incompatible?
Wherein hes the incompatibihty?
—
My reply briefly is and this is the kernel of what
—
I have to say that orthodox modern science shows us
a self-contained and self-sufficient universe, not in
touch with anything beyond or above itself, the gen- —
eral trend and outline of it known; —
nothing super-
natural or miraculous, no intervention of beings other
than ourselves, being conceived possible.
While religion, on the other hand, requires us con-
stantly and consciously to be in touch, —
even af-
fectionately in touch, —with a power, a mind, a being
or beings, entirely out of our sphere, entirelybeyond
our scientific ken; the universe contemplated by
religion is by no means self-contained or self-sufii-
cient, it is dependent for its origin and maintenance,
6 SCIENCE AND FAITH
as we are for our daily bread and future hopes, upon

the power and the goodwill of a being or beings of
which science has no knowledge. Science does not in-
deed always or consistently deny the existence of such
transcendent beings, nor does it make any eifectual
attempt to limit their potential powers, but it defi-
nitely disbelieves in their exerting any actual influ-
ence on the progress of events, or in their producing
or modifying the simplest physical phenomenon.
For instance, it is now considered unscientific to
pray for rain, and Professor Tyndall went so far as
to say:
"The principle [of the conservation of energy]
teaches us that the Italian wind gliding over the crest
of the Matterhorn is as firmly ruled as the earth in its
orbital revolution round the sun and that the
of; fall
its vapour into clouds is exactly as much a matter of
necessity as the return of the seasons. The disper-

sion, therefore, of the slightest mist by the special
volition of the Eternal, would be as much a miracle
as the rolling of the Rhone over the Grimsel preci-
pices, down the valley of Hash to Meyringen and
Brientz. . . .
"Without the disturbance of a natural law, quite

as serious as the stoppage of an eclipse, or the rolling
of the river Niagara up the Falls no act of humilia-
tion individual or national, could call one shower from
heaven, or deflect towards us a single beam of the
'
sun."
1 From Fragments of Science, " Prayer and Natural Law."

Certain objections may be made to this statement

of Professor Tyndall's, even from the strictly scien-
tific point of view: the law of the conservation of
energy is needlessly dragged in when it has nothing

really to do with it. We ourselves, for instance,
though we have no power, nor hint of any power, to
override the conservation of energy, are yet readily
able, by a simple physical experiment, or by an en-
gineering operation, to deflect a ray of light or to
dissipate a mist, or divert a wind, or pump water
uphill; and further objections may be made to the
form of the statement notably to the word "there-
fore" as used to connect propositions entirely differ-
ent in their terms. But the meaning is quite plain
nevertheless. The assertion is that any act, how-
ever simple, if achieved by special vohtion of the
Eternal, would be a miracle; and the implied dogma
is that the special volition of the Eternal cannot, or at
any rate does not, accomplish anything whatever in
the physical world. And this dogma, although not
really a deduction from any of the known principles
of physical science, and possibly open to objection as a
petitio principii, may nevertheless be taken as a some-
what exuberant statement of the generally accepted
inductive teaching of orthodox science on the subject.
It ought, however, to be admitted at once by Nat-
ural Philosophers that the unscientific character of
prayer for rain depends really not upon its conflict
with any known physical law, since it need involve
no greater interference with the order of nature than
is implied in a request to a gardener to water the gar-
—
8 SCIENCE AND FAITH
—
den it does not really depend upon the impossibility
of causing rain to fall when otherwise it might not
but upon the disbelief of science in any power who
can and will attend and act. To prove this, let us
bethink ourselves that it is not an inconceivable possi-
bility that at some future date mankind may acquire
some control over the weather, and be able to influ-
ence it; not merely in an indirect manner, as at
present they can affect cKmate, by felling forests or
flooding deserts, but in some more direct fashion; in
that case prayers for rain would begin again, only
the petitions would be addressed, not to heaven,
but to the Meteorological Office. We
do not at
present ask the secretary of that government
department to improve our seasons, simply because
we do not think that he knows how if we thought he
;
did, we should not be debarred from approaching him

by a suspicion of his possible non-existence, or a fear
that our request would not be delivered. Professor
Tyndall's dogma will, if pressed, be found to neces-
sitate one of these last alternatives; although super-
ficially it pretends to make the somewhat grotesque
suggestion that the alteration requested is so compli-
cated and involved, that really, with the best intentions
in the world, the Deity does not know how to do it.
An attitude of pious resignation might be taken,
that the central Office knew bestwhat it was about,
and that petitions were only worrying but that would
;
be rather a supine and fatalistic attitude if we were in

real distress, and certainly, on a higher level, it would
be a very unfilial one. Rehgious people have been
told, on v/hat they generally take to be good author-

ity, that prayer might be a miraculously powerful
engine for achievement, even in the physical world,
if they would only believe with sufficient vigour; but
(I am not here questioning the soundness of their
position) they have dramatised or spiritualised away
the statement, and act upon it no more. Influenced
it is to be presumed by science, they have come defi-
nitely to disbelieve in physical interference of any

kind whatever on the part of another order of beings,
whether more exalted or more depraved than our-
selves, although such beings are frequently mentioned
in their sacred books.
Whatever they might be able to do if they chose,
for all practical purposes such beings are to the aver-
age scientific man purely imaginary, and he feels
sure that we can never have experiential knowledge
of them or their powers. In his view the universe lies
before us for investigation, and, so far as he can see,
it is complete without them; it is subject to our own
partial control if we are willing patiently to learn
how to exercise it, but of any other control, we would
say, there is no perceptible trace. Even in the most

vital concerns of life, it is the doctor, not the priest,
who is summoned a: no longer attributed
pestilence is
to Divine jealousy, nor would the threshing-floor of

Araunah be used to stay it.
The two subjects, moreover, adopt very different
modes of expression. The death of an archbishop
can be stated scientifically in terms not very different
from those appropriate to the stoppage of a clock, or
10 SCIENCE AND FAITH
the extinction of a fire ; but the religious formula for

the same event has pleased God in His in-
is that it
finite wisdom Himself the soul of our dear

to take to
brother, etc. The very words of such a statement are
to modern science unmeaning. (In saying this, I
trust to be understood as not now in the slightest
degree attempting to prejudge the question, which
form is the more appropriate.)
ReKgion may, in fact, be called supernatural or
*
super scientific, if the term 'natural" be limited to
that region of which we now believe that we have any
direct scientific knowledge.
In disposition also Rehgion and Science are oppo-
site. Science cultivates a \dgorous adult, intelligent,
serpent-like wisdom, and active interference with the
course of nature; rehgion fosters a meek, receptive,
child-hearted attitude of dovehke resignation to the
Divine will.
Take a scientific man who is a man of science, pure

and simple with no element either of a poet, or a
philosopher, or a saint, and place him in the atmos-
phere habitual to the churches, and he must starve.—
He requires sohd food, but his sole provision is air.
He requires something to touch and define and know;
but all his surroundings are ethereal, indefinable,
illimitable, incomprehensible, beautiful, and vague.
He dies of inanition.
Take, again, a narrow rehgious man —one in whom
religion is the sole aptitude —
dry work-
into the cold
ings, the gropings and tunnellings of science, where
ever}i:hing must be scrutinised and proved, distinctly
conceived and precisely formulated, —

and he cannot
breathe. He ample
requiresair and space; whereas
he finds himself underground, among foundations
and masonry, very solid and substantial, but com-
pletely cabined and confined. He dies of asphyxia.
If a man be able to live in both regions, to be am-
phibious as it were, —able to take short flights occa-
sionally, and able to burrow underground occasionally,
accepting the solid work of science and believing its
truth, realising the aerial structures of rehgion, and

perceiving their beauty, — ^will such a man be as hap-
pily and powerfully at home in the air as if he had
no earth adhering to his wings? Is the modern man
as happily and as powerfully religious as he might
have been with less information about the universe?
Or, I would add parenthetically, as he will yet as-
suredly become, with more?
II
Leaving general considerations, and coming to de-

tails, let us look at a few of the simpler religious
doctrines, such as are still, I suppose, popularly held

in this country.
The creed of was well, or at
the ancient Israelites
least strikingly,summarised by Mr. Huxley in one
of his Nineteenth Century articles (March 1886).
He there says: "The chief articles of the theological
creed of the old Israelites, which are made known to
us by the direct evidence of the ancient records, . . .
are as remarkable for that which they contain as for

that which is absent from them. They reveal a firm
conviction that, when death takes place, a something

termed a soul, or spirit, leaves the body and con-
tinues to exist in Sheol for a period of indefinite
duration, even though there no proof of any belief
is
in absolute immortality; that such spirits can return

to earth to possess and inspire the living; that they
are in appearance and in disposition hkenesses of the
men to whom they belonged, but that, as spirits, they
have larger powers and are freer from physical limit-
ations that they thus form one of a number of kinds
;
of spiritual existence known as Elohim, of whom

Jahveh, the national God of Israel, is one that, con-
;
sistently with this view, Jahveh was conceived as a

sort of spirit, human in aspect and in sense, and with
many human passions, but with immensely greater
intelligence and power than any other Elohim,
whether human or divine."
The mere calm statement of such a creed was
plainly held by Mr. Huxley to be a sufficient refuta-
tion.
But we need not hmit ourselves to the Old Testa-
ment, some of whose alleged facts may admittedly be
abandoned without detriment, as belonging to the
legendary or the obscure; we may be constrained by
science to go further, and to maintain that even what
some regard as fundamental Christian tenets, such as
the Incarnation or non -natural birth, and the Resur-
rection or non-natural disappearance of the body from
the tomb, have, from the scientific point of view, no
reasonable likelihood or probability whatever. It may
be, and often has been, asserted that they appear as
childish fancies, appropriate to the infancy of civilisa-
tion and a age readily intelligi-

prescientific credulous ;
ble to the historian and student of folk-lore, but not

otherwise interesting. The same has been said of
every variety of alleged miraculous occurrence, and
not merely of such dogmas as the fall of man from
an original state of perfection, of the subsequent ex-
tirpation of the human race down to a single family,
and so on.
The whole historical record, wherever it exceeds the
commonplace, every act attributed directly to the
Deity, whether it be sending fire from heaven, or
writing upon stone, or leadings by cloud and fire, or
conversations, whether during trance or otherwise, is
incompatible with the teachings of modern science (let

it be clearly remembered how I have defined the
phrase "modern science" above) and when consid-
;
ered prosaically, much of the record is summarily

discredited, even by many theologians now. Nor
is this acquiescence in negation confined to the
leaders. The general religious world has agreed ap-
parently to throw overboard Jonah and the whale,
Joshua and the sun, the three Children and the fiery
furnace; it does not seem to take anything in the
book of Judges or the book of Daniel very seriously;
and though it still clings pathetically to the book of
Genesis, it is willing to relegate to poetry, i.e, to im-
agination or fiction, such legends as the creation of
the world, Adam
and his rib. Eve and the apple,
Noah and his ark, language and the tower of Babel,
Ehjah and the chariot of fire, and many others. The
stock reconciling phrase, applied to the legend of the

six-days' creation, or the Levitican mistakes in Nat-
ural History, after the strained "day-period" mode
of interpretation had heen exploded in "Essays and
Reviews," used to be, that the Bible was never meant
whenever it touches upon
to teach science ; wherefore,
any branch of natural knowledge, its statements are
to be interpreted in a friendly spirit, i,e, it is to be
glossed over, and in fact disbelieved. But a book
which deals with so prodigious a subject as the origin
of all things, and the history of the human race, can-
not avoid a treatment of natural facts which is really
a teaching of science, whether such teaching is meant
or not; and indeed the whole idea involved in the
word "meant" is repugnant to the conceptions of
biological science, which claims to have ousted teleol-
ogy from its arena.
Moreover, if religious people go as far as this,
where are they to stop? What, then, do they pro-
pose to do vrith the turning of water into wine, the
ejection of devils, the cursing of the fig-tree, the
feeding of five thousand, the raising of Lazarus?
Or, to go deeper still, what do they make of the
scene at the Baptism, of the Transfiguration, of the
Crucifixion, the appearances after Death, the As-
cension into heaven? On all these points I venture to
suggest that neither religion nor science has said its
last word.
But it may be urged that even these are but details
compared with the one transcendent doctrine of the
existence of an omnipotent and omniscient benevo-
lent personal God; the fundamental tenet of nearly

all religions. But so far as science has anything to
say on this subject, and it has not very much, its
tendency is to throw mistrust, not upon the existence
of Deity itself, but upon any adjectives apphed to
the Deity. "Infinite" and "eternal" may pass, and
"omnipotent" and "omniscient" may reluctantly be
permitted to enter with them, — ^these expansive epi-
thets relieve the mind, without expressing more than
is God. But
implicitly contained in the substantive
concerning "personal" and "benevolent" and other
anthropomorphic adjectives, science is exceedingly
dubious; nor is onmipotence itself very easily recon-
cilable with the actual condition of things as we now
experience them. The present state of the world is
very far short of perfection. Why are things still
imperfect if controlled by a benevolent omnipotence?
Why, indeed, does evil or pain at all exist? All very
ancient puzzles these, but still alive; and the solution
to them so far attempted by science lies in the word
Evolution, a word whose applicability to the work of
a perfect God may readily be the subject of contro-
versy.
Taught by science, we learn that there has been no
fall of man, there has been a rise. Through an ape-
like ancestry, back through a tadpole and fishlike
ancestry, away to the early beginnings of life, the
origin of man is being traced by science. There was
no specific creation of the world such as was con-
ceived appropriate to a geocentric conception of the
universe; the world is a condensation of primeval gas,
—
a congeries of stones and meteors fallen together;

still falling together, indeed, in a larger neighboring
mass (the Sun). By the energy of that still persist-
ent falling together, the ether near us is kept con-
stantly agitated, and to the energy of this ethereal
agitation all the manifold activity of our planet is
due. The whole system has evolved itself from mere

moving matter in accordance with the law of gravi-
tation, and there is no certain sign of either begin-
ning or end. Solar systems can by collision or other-
wise resolve themselves into nebulse, and nebulse left
to themselves can condense into solar systems,
everywhere in the spaces around us we see a part of
the process going on; the formation of solar systems
from whirhng nebulae Ues before our eyes, if not in
the visible sky itself, yet in the magnified photo-
graphs taken of that sky. Even though the w^hole
process of evolution is not completely understood as
yet, does anyone doubt that it w411 become more thor-
oughly understood in time? and if they do doubt it,
would they hope effectively to bolster up religion by
such a doubt?
It is difficult to resist yielding to the bent and trend
*
of 'modern science," as well as to its proved conclu-
sions. Its bent and trend may have been wrongly
estimated by its present disciples: a large tract of
knowledge may have been omitted from its ken,
which when included will revolutionise some of their
accepted opinions; but, however this may be, there
can be no doubt about the tendency of orthodox
science at the present time. It suggests to us that
the Cosmos is self-explanatory, self-contained, and

self -maintaining. From everlasting to everlasting
the material universe rolls on, composing worldsand
disintegrating them, producing vegetable beauty and
destroying it, evolving intelligent animal life, devel-
oping that into a self-conscious human race, and then
plunging it once more into annihilation.
"Thou makest thine appeal to me!
I bring to life, I bring to death,
The spirit does but mean the breath,
I know no more. .". .
But at this point the theologian happily and

eagerly interposes, with a crucial inquiry of science
about this same bringing to Granted that the
life.
blaze of the sun accounts for winds and waves, and

hail, and rain, and rivers, and all the myriad activities
of the earth, does account for life? Has it ac-

it
counted for the of the lowest animal, the tiniest

life
plant, the simplest cell, hardly visible but yet self-

moving, in the field of a microscope?
And science, in chagrin, has to confess that hitherto
in this direction it has failed. It has not yet witnessed
the origin of the smallest trace of life from dead mat-
ter: all life, so far as has been watched, proceeds
from antecedent life. Given the life of a single cell,
science would esteem itself competent ultimately to
trace its evolution into all the myriad existences of
plant and animal and man; but the origin of proto-
plasmic activity itself as yet eludes it. But will the
Theologian triumph in the admission? will he therein
detect at last the dam which shall stem the torrent of
scepticism? T\dll he base an argument for the direct

action of the Deity in mundane affairs on that fail-
ure, and entrench himself beliind that present incom-

petence of labouring men? If so, he takes his stand
on what may prove a yielding foundation. The pres-
ent powerlessness of science to explain or originate
life is a convenient weapon wherewith to fell a
pseudo-scientific antagonist who is dogmatising too
loudly out of bounds; but it is not perfectly secure
as a permanent support. In an early stage of civiH-
sation it may have been supposed that flame only pro-
ceeded from antecedent flame, but the tinder-box and
the lucif er-match were invented nevertheless. Theo-
logians have probably learnt by this time that their
central tenets should not be founded, even partially,
upon nescience, or upon negations of any kind, lest
the placid progress of positive knowledge should
once more undermine their position, and another dis-
covery have to be scouted with alarmed and violent
anathemas.
Any any century, the physical aspect of
year, or
the nature of life may become more intelhgible, and
may perhaps resolve itself into an action of already
known forces on the very complex molecule of
protoplasm. Already in Germany have inorganic
and artificial substances been found to crawl about on
glass slides under the action of surface-tension or
capillarity, with an appearance which is said to have
deceived even a biologist into hastily pronouncing
them living amoebae. Life in its ultimate element and
on its material side is such a simple thing, it is but a
slight extension of known chemical and physical

forces ; the cell must be able to respond to stimuli, to
assimilate outside materials, and to subdivide. I ap-
prehend that there is not a biologist but believes (per-
haps quite erroneously) that sooner or later the dis-
covery will be made, and that a cell having all the
essential functions of life will be constructed out of
inorganic material. Seventy years ago organic
chemistry was the chemistry of vital products, of
compounds that could not be made artificially by man.
Now there is no such chemistry ; the name persists, but
its meaning has changed.
It may be conceivably argued that after all we are
alive, and that if we ever learn how to make animals
or plants, they as our creation will originate from
pre-existent life; just as when we make new species
by artificial selection we exercise a control over the
forces of nature which may have some remote likeness
to Divine control. And this may possibly be a theme
capable of enlargement.
But meanwhile what do we mean by such a phrase
as "Divine control"? for, after all, the controversy be-
tween religion and science is not so much a contro-
versy as to the being or not being of a God. Science
might be willing to concede His existence as a vague
and ineffective hypothesis, but there would still re-
main a question as to His mode of action, a contro-
versy as to the method of the Divine government of
the world.
And this is the standing controversy, by no means
really dead at the present day. Is the world con-
trolled by a living Person, accessible to prayer, influ-

enced by love, able and willing to foresee, to inter-
vene, to guide and wistfully to lead without compul-
sion spirits in some sort akin to Himself?
Or is the world a self -generated, self -controlling
machine, complete and fully organised for movement,
either up or down, for progress or degeneration, ac-
cording to the chances of heredity and the influence
of environment? Has the world, as it were, secreted
or arrived at life and mind and consciousness by the
play of natural forces acting on the complexities of
highly developed molecular aggregates ; at first, life-
cells, ultimately brain-cells; and these are not the or-

gan or instrument, but the very reality and essence
of life and of mind?
If there be any other orders of conscious existence
in the universe, as probably there are, are they also
locked up on power
their several planets, without the
of coromunicating or helping or informing, and all
working out their own destiny in permanent isola-
tion? Everything in such a world would be not only
apparently but really a definite sequence of cause and
eff*ect, just as it seems to us here; and prayer, to be
efl*ectual in such a world must be not what theologians

mean by prayer, but must be either simple meditation
for acquiescence in the inevitable, or else a petition
addressed to some other of the dwellers in our time
and place, that they may be induced by benevolent
acts to ease some of the burdens to which their peti-
tioners are liable.
We thus return to our original thesis, that the root

question or outstanding controversy between science
and faith rests upon two distinct conceptions of the
universe: —the one, that of a self-contained and self-
sufficient universe, with no outlook into or hnks with
anything beyond, uninfluenced by any life or mind
except such asis connected with a visible and tangible
material body; and the other conception, that of a

universe lying open to manner of spiritual influ-
all
ences, permeated through and through with a Divine

spirit, guided and watched by Uving minds, acting
through the medium of law indeed, but with intelli-
gence and love behind the law a universe by no means
:
self-sufficient or self-contained, but with sensitive ten-

drils groping into another supersensuous order of
existence, where reign laws hitherto unimagined by
science, but laws as real and as mighty as those by
which the material universe is governed.
According to the one conception, faith is childish
and prayer absurd; the only individual immortality
lies in the memory of descendants; benevolence and
cheerful acquiescence in fate are the highest rehgious
attributes possible and the future of the human race
;
is determined by the law of gravitation and the cir-

cumstances of space.
According to the other conception, prayer may be
mighty to the removal of mountains, and by faith we
may feel ourselves citizens of an eternal and glorious
cosmogony of mutual help and co-operation, advanc-
ing from lowly stages to ever higher states of happy
activity,world without end, and may catch in antici-

pation some glimpses of that "one far-off divine event
to which the whole creation moves."
The whole controversy hinges, in one sense, on a
—
practical pivot the efficacy of prayer. Is prayer to
hypothetical and supersensuous beings as senseless
and useless as it is unscientific, or does prayer pierce
through the husk and apparent covering of the sen-
suous universe, and reach sometliing living, loving,
and helpful beyond?
And in another sense the controversy turns upon a
question of fact. Do we live in a universe permeated
with Ufe and mind: life and mind independent of
matter and unlimited in indi\ddual duration? Or is
life limited, in space to the surface of planetary

masses of matter, and in time to the duration of the
material envelope essential to its manifestation?
The answer is given in oneway by orthodox mod-
ern science, and in another way by Religion of all
times and until these
; opposite answers are made con-
sistent, the reconciliation between Science and Faith is
incomplete.
CHAPTER II
THE RECONCILIATION
may or may not have been observed, by anyone

ITwho has read the previous chapter, —^but in so far
as it has been missed, the whole meaning has been
misconceived, —that when speaking of the atmosphere
or the conclusions, the doctrines or the tendency, of
"science," I was careful always to explain that I
meant orthodox or present-day science; meaning not
the comprehensive grasp of a Newton, but science as
now interpreted by its recognised official exponents,
— by the average Fellow of the Royal Society for
instance. Just as by "faith" I intended not the ec-
static insight aroused in a seer by some momentary
revelation, but the ordinary workaday belief of the
average enlightened theologian. And my thesis was
that the attitudes of mind appropriate to these two
classes, were at present fundamentally diverse; that
there was still an outstanding controversy, or ground
for controversy, between science and faith, although
active fighting has been suspended, and although all
bitterness has passed from the conflict, let us hope
never to return. But the diversity remains, and for
28
24 SCIENCE AlifD FAITH
the present it is better so, if it has not achieved its
work. Eliminating the bitterness, the conflict has

been useful, and it would be far from well even to
attempt to bring it to a close prematurely. But yet
there must be an end to it some time reconciliation is ;
bound to lie somewhere in the future no two parts or ;
aspects of the Universe can permanently and really

be discordant. The only question is where the meet-
ing-place may be
whether it is nearest to the orthodox
;
faith or to the orthodox science of the present day.

This question is the subject of the present chapter,
which is a sequel to the preceding. Let me, greatly
daring, presume to enter upon the inquiry into what
is really true and essential in the opposing creeds, how
much of each has its origin in over-hasty assumption
or fancy, and how far the opposing views are merely
a natural consequence of imperfect vision of opposite
sides of the same veil.
First among the truths that will have to be ac-

cepted by both sides, we may Law,take the reign of
sometimes called the Uniformity of Nature. The dis-
covery of uniformity must be regarded as mainly the
work of Science: it did not come by revelation. In
moments of inspiration it was glimpsed, "the same —
yesterday, to-day, and for ever," but the glimpse —
was only momentary, the Hebrew "atmosphere" was
saturated with the mists of cataclysm, visible judg-
ments, and conspicuous interferences. used to We
be told that the Creator's methods were adapted to the
stage of His Creatures, and varied from age to age:
that it was really His actions, and not their mode of
THE RECONCILIATION 25
regarding them, that varied. The doctrine of uni-

formity first took root and grew in scientific soil.
At first sight this doctrine of uniformity excludes

Divine control; and the law of evolution proceeds
still further in the direction of excluding everything;
in the nature of personal will, of intention, of guid-

ance, of adaptation, of management. It shows that
things change and how they change, and it attempts
to show why they change. The Darwinian form of it
attempts to account for the origin of species by in-
evitable necessity, free from artificial selection or op-
erations analogous to those of the breeder. The old
Theology has gone, and guidance and purpose appear
to have gone with it.
At first sight, but at first sight only. So might an
observer, inspecting some great and perfect factory,
with machines constantly weaving patterns, some
beautiful, some ugly, conclude, or permit himself to
dream at least, after some hours' watching, during
which everything proceeded without a hitch, driven as
it were by inexorable fate, that everything went off
itself, controlled by cold dreary necessity. And if

his scrutiny could be continued for weeks or years,
and it still presented the same aspect, his dream
would begin to seem to be true: the perfection of
mechanism would weary the spectator: his human
weakness would long for something to go wrong, so
that someone from an upper office might step down
and set it right again. Humanity is accustomed to
such interventions and breaks in a ceaseless sequence,
and, when no such breaks and interventions occur,
may conclude hastily that the scheme is self-originat«

ing, self-sustained, that it works to no ultimate and
foreseen destiny.
So sometimes, looking end of London,
at the east
or many another only smaller city, has the feeling of
despair seized men they wonder what it can all mean.
:
So, on the other hand, looking at the loom of nature,

has the feeling, not of despair, but of what has been
called atheism, one ingredient of atheism, arisen athe- :
ism never fully realised, and wrongly so-called; re-

cently it has been called severe Theism indeed; for it
is joyful sometimes, interested and placid always, ex-
ultant at the strange splendour of the spectacle which

its intellect has laid bare to contemplation, satisfied
with the perfection of the mechanism, content to be a
part of the self -generated organism, and endeavour-
ing to think that the feelings of duty, of earnest ef-
fort, and of faithful service, which conspicuously
persist in spite of all discouragement, are on this
view intelligible as well as instinctive, and sure that
nothing less than unrepining, unfaltering, unswerv-
ing acquiescence is worthy of our dignity as man.
The law of evolution not only studies change and
progress, it seeks to trace sequences back to ante-
cedents : it strains after the origin of all things. But
ultimate origins are inscrutable. Let us admit, as
scientific men, that of real origin, even of the sim-
plest thing, we know nothing; not even of a pebble.
Sand is the debris of rocks, and fresh rocks can be
formed of compacted sand but this suggests infinity,
;
not origin. Infinity is non-human and we shrink

from it, yet what else can there be in space? And if

in space, why not in time also? Much might be said
here, but let it pass. We must admit that science
knows nothing of ultimate origins. Which first,
the hen or the egg'^. is a trivial form of a very
real puzzle. That the world, in the sense of this
planet, this homely lump of matter we call the earth
— that this had an origin, a history, a past, intelhgible
more or less, growingly intelligible to the eye of
science, is true enough. The date when it was molten
may be roughly estimated; the manner and mechan-
ism of the birth of the moon has been guessed: the
earth and moon then originated in one sense; before
that they were part of a nebula, hke the rest of the
solar system; and some day the solar system may
again be part of a nebula, by reason of collision with
some at present tremendously distant mass. But
all that nothing to the Universe; nothing even to
is
the visible universe. The collisions there take place

every now and again before our eyes. The Universe
is full of lumps of matter of every imaginable size:
the history of a solar system may be written its birth—

and also its death, separated perhaps by millions of
millions of years; but what of that? It is but an epi-
sode, a moment in the eternal cosmogony, and the
eye of history looks to what happened before the
birth and after the death of any particular aggre-
gate; just as a child may trace the origin and the de-
struction of a soap bubble, the form of which is evan-
escent, the material of which is permanent.
While the soap bubble lived it was the scene of
:
much beauty and of a kind of law and order impossi-

ble to the mere water and soap out of which it was
made, and into which again it has collapsed. The his-
tory of the soap bubble can be written, but there is a
before and an after. So it is mth the solar system so ;
with any assigned collocation of matter in the uni-

verse. No point in space can be thought of "at which
if a man stand it shall be impossible for him to cast a
javelin into the beyond;" nor can any epoch be con-
ceived in time at which the mind will not instantly
and automatically inquire, "and what before," or
"what after?"
Yet does the human mind pine for something finite
it longs for a beginning, even if it could dispense
with an end. It has tried of late to imagine that the
law of dissipation of energy was a heaven-sent mes-
sage of the finite duration of the Universe, so that
before everything was, it could seek a Great First
Cause; and after everything had been, could take
refuge once more in Him.
Seen more closely, these are childish notions. They
would give no real help if they were true; any more
than other fairy tales suitable for children.
In the dawn of civilisation God "walked in the gar-
den in the cool of the day." Down to say the middle
of the nineteenth century He brought things into
existence by a creative Fiatj and looked on His work
for a time with approbation; only to step down and
destroy a good deal of it before many years had
elapsed, and then to patch it up and try to mend it
from time to time.
All very human : the endless rumble of the machin-

ery is distressing, perfection is intolerable. Still more
intolerable is imperfection not attended to; the
machinery groans, lacks oil, shows signs of wear,
some of the fabrics it is weaving are hideous; why,
why, does no one care? Surely the manager will be-
fore long step down and put one of the looms to
rights, or scold a workman, or tell us what it is all for,
and why he needs the woven fabric, der Gottheit
lebendiges Kleid.
We see that he does not now interfere, not even
when things go very wrong; the "hands" are left to
put things right as best they can, nothing mysterious
ever happens now, it is all commonplace and semi-
intelligible we ourselves could easily throw a machine
;
out of gear; we do, sometimes; we ourselves if we

are clever enough and patient enough, could even
perform the far harder task of putting one to right
again; we could even suggest fresh patterns; we
seem to be more than onlookers as musicians and —
artists we can create —
perhaps we are foremen; and
if ideas occur to us, why should we not throw them
into the common stock? There is no head manager
at all, this thing has been always running; as the
hands die off, others take their places; they have not
been selected or appointed to the job; they are only
here as the fittest of a large number of whom they
alone survive; even the looms seem to have a self-
mending, self -regenerative power; and we ourselves,
we are not looking at it or assisting in it for long.
When we go, other brilliantly endowed and inventive
— —
so SCIENCE AND FAITH
spectators or helpers will take our places. We under-

stand the whole arrangement now; it it simpler than
at first we thought.
Is it, then, so simple? Does the uniformity and
the eternity and the self-sustainedness of it make it
the easier to understand? Are we so sure that the

guidance and control are not really continuous, in-
stead of being, as we expected, intermittent? May
we be not looking at the working of the Manager all
the time, and at nothing else? Why should He step
down and interfere with Himself?
That is the lesson science has to teach theology
to look for the action of the Deity, if at all, then
always not in the past alone, nor only in the future,
;
but equally in the present. If His action is not visi-

ble now, it never will be, and never has been visible.
Shall we look for it in toy eruptions in the West
Indies? As well look for it in the fall of a child's
box of bricks! Shall we hope to see the Deity some
day step out of Himself and display His might or
His love or some other attribute? We can see Him
now if we look; if we cannot see, it is only that our
eyes are shut.
"Closer is He than breathing, nearer than hands or feet:"
poetry, yes —but also science; the real trend and

meaning of Science, whether of orthodox "science"
or not.
II
There is nothing new in Pantheism: — îndeed no!

But there are different kinds of pantheism. That
the All is a manifestation, a revelation of God, —that

it isin a manner, a dim and ungraspable manner, in
—
some sort God Himself, ^may be readily granted;
but what does the All include? It were a strange
kind of All that included mountains and trees, the
forces of nature, and the visible material universe
only, and excluded the intelligence, the will, the
emotions, the individuality or personality, of which
we ourselves are immediately conscious. Shall we
and God not possess them? That
possess these things
would be no pantheism at all. Any power, any love,
of which we ourselves are conscious does thereby cer-
tainly existand ; so it must exist in highly intensified
and nobler form in the totality of things, —unless we
make the grotesque assumption that in all the infinite
universe we denizens of planet Earth are the highest.
Let no worthy human attribute be denied to the Deity.
In Anthropomorphism there are many errors, but
there is one truth. Whatever worthy attribute be-
longs to man, be it personality or any other, its exist-
ence in the Universe is thereby admitted; it belongs
to the All.
The only conceivable way of denying personality,
and and failure, and renewed effort, and
effort,
consciousness, and love, and hate too, for that matter,
in the real whole of things, is to regard them as
illusory, —
physiological and purely material illusions
in ourselves. Even so, they are in some sense there;
they are not unreal, however they are to be accounted
for. We must blink nothing; evolution is a truth, a
strange and puzzling truth; "the whole creation
groaneth and travaileth together;" and the most

perfect of all the sons of men, the likest God this
planet ever saw, He to whom many look for their idea
of what God is, surely He taught us that suffering,
and sacrifice, and wistful yearning for something not
yet attainable, were not to be regarded as human
attributes alone.
Must we not admit the evil attributes also ? In the
Whole, yes; but one of our experiences is that there
are grades of existence. We
recognise that in our-
selves the ape and tiger are dying out, that the germs
of higher faculties have made their appearance; it is
an intensification of the higher that we may infer in

the more advanced grades of existence intensification ;
of the lower hes behind and beneath us.

The inference or deduction of some of the attri-
butes of Deity, from that which we can recognise as
"the likest God within the soul," is a legitimate deduc-
tion, if properly carried out and
; it is in close corres-
pondence with the methods of physical science. It
has been said that from the properties of a drop of
water the possibility of a Niagara or an Atlantic
might be inferred by a man who had seen or heard of
neither.^ And it is true that by experiment on a small
quantity of water a man with the brain of Newton
and the mathematical power and knowledge of Lord
Rayleigh could deduce by pure reasoning most if
not all of the inorganic phenomena of an ocean and ;
that not vaguely but definitely the existence of waves

;
on its surface, the rate at which they would travel as

1 Sir Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet.
dependent upon distance from crest to crest, their

maximum height, their length as depending on depth
of sea; the existence of ripples also, going at a dif-
ferent pace and following a different law the break- ;
ing of waves upon a shore; the tides also; the ocean

currents caused by inequalities of temperature, and
many other properties which are realised in an actual
ocean: —not as topographical realities indeed, but as
necessary theoretical consequences of the hypothetical
existence of so great a mass of water. Reasoning
from the small to the great is legitimate reasoning,
notwithstanding that by increase of sizephenomena
wholly different and at first sight unexpected come
into being. No one not a mathematician looking at
a drop of water could infer the Atlantic billows or
the tides but they are all there in embryo, given gravi-
;
tation; and yet not there in actuality in even the

smallest degree. People sometimes think that
increase of size is mere magnification, and introduces
no new property. They are mistaken. Waves
could not be on a drop, nor tides either, nor water-
spouts, nor storms. The simple fact that the earth is
large makes it retain an atmosphere and the existence
;
of an atmosphere enliances the importance of a globe

beyond all comparison, and renders possible plant
and animal life. The simple fact that the sun is ve7'y
large makes it hot, i.e. enables it to generate heat, and
so fits it to be the centre and source of energy to
worlds of habitable activity.
To suppose that tlie deduction of divine attributes
by intensification of our own attributes must neces-
sarily result in a "magnified non-natural man" is to

forget these facts of physical science. If the rea-
soning is bad, or the data insufficient, the result is
worthless, but the method is legitimate, though far

from easy; and it is hardly to be expected that the
science of theology can yet have Newton, or had its
even its Copernicus/ At

it is safest to walk
present
by faith and inspiration; and it is the saint and
prophet rather than the theologian whom humanity
would prefer to trust.
Ill
Now let us go
back to our groping inquiry ^to the —
series of questions left unanswered in the latter
—
portion of Chapter I and ask, what then of prayer,
regarded scientifically; of miracle, if we like to call
it miracle; of the region not only of emotion and in-
telligence, but of active work, guidance, and inter-

ference? Are these, after all, so rigorously excluded
by the reign of law? Are not these also parts of its
kingdom? Shall law apply only to the inorganic and
the non-living? Shall it not rule the domain of fife
1 Theologians may differ from this estimate; and if so, I defer to

their opinion. It is well known that the topics slightly glanced at in
the first half of this section have been profoundly studied by them;
but the subject is so difficult that an outsider can hardly assume that
as much progress has been made in Theology as in the physical sciences.
Not so much progress has been made even in the biological sciences as
in the more specifically physical. It is sometimes said that biology has
had its Newton, but it is not so: Darwin was its Copernicus, and
revolutionised ideas as the era of Copernicus did. Newton did not
revolutionise ideas: his was a synthetic and deductive era.
—
and of mind too? Speaking or thinking of the

Universe, we must exclude no part;
"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body nature is, and God the soul;"
" For as the reasonable soul and human flesh is one man "
SO God and man constitute a unity, —a unity char-

acterized by moral freedom in accordance with law.
Let us take this question of guidance. We must
see it in action now or never. Do we see it now?
Orthodox theology vaguely assumes it; orthodox
science sees it not at all. What is the truth? Is the
blindness of science subjective or objective? Is the
vision absent because there nothing to see or be-
is
cause we have shut our eyes, and have declined to con-

template a region of dim and misty fact ?
Take the origin of species by the persistence of
favourable variations, how is the appearance of those
same favourable variations accounted for? Except
by artificial selection, not at all. Given their appear-
ance, their development by struggle and inheritance
and survival can be explained; but that they arose
spontaneously, by random change without purpose,
is an assertion which cannot be made. Does anyone
think that the skill of the beaver, the instinct of the
bee, the genius of a man, arose by chance, and that
its presence is accounted for by handing down and by
survival? What struggle for existence will explain
the advent of Beethoven? What pitiful necessity
for earning a living as a dramatist will educe for us
—:
S6 SCIEN'CE AND FAITH

Shakespeare? These things are beyond science of
the orthodox t^-pe then let
; it be silent and deny noth-
ing m the Universe till it has at least made an honest

effort to comprehend the whole.
Genius, however, science has made an effort not
wholly to ignore; but take other human faculties
Premonition, Inspiration, Prevision, Telepathy
what is the meaning of these things ? Orthodox science
refuses to contemplate them, orthodox theology- also
looks at some of them askance. !Many philosophers
have relegated them to the region of the unconscious,
or the subconscious, where dwell things of notliing
worth. A few Psychologists are beginning to attend.
]Men of rehgion can hold aloof or not as they please
probably they had better hold aloof mitil the scientific
basis of these things has been rendered more secure.
At present they are beyond the pale of science, but
they are some of them inside the Universe of fact,
all of them, as I now begm to beheve, — and their
meaning must be extracted. So long as tliis region is
ignored, dogmatic science should be silent. It has a
right to its o^vn adopted region, it has no right to be
heard outside. It cannot see guidance, it cannot rec-
ognise the meardng of the whole trend of tilings, the
constant leadings, the control, the help, the revela-
tions, the beckonings, beyond our normal bodily and
mental powers. Xo, for it vriU not look. 'SMiat be-
comes of an intelhgence which has left this earth?
^Mience comes the nascent intelligence which arrives?
What is the meaning of our human personality and
individuahty ? Did we spring into existence a few
years ago? Do we cease to exist a few years hence?

It does not know. It does notwant to know.
Does theology seek enlightenment any more ener-
getically? No, it is satisfied with its present informa*
tion, which some people mistake for divine knowledge
on these subjects. Divine knowledge is perhaps not
obtained so easily.
At present, scheme we strangely draw
in the cosmic
the line at man. We know of every grade of animal
life from the amoeba upwards, with some slight hiatus
—
here and there, the lowest being single cells indis-
—
tinguishable from plants, but the series terminates
with man. From man the scale of existence is sup-
posed to step to God. Is it not somewhat sudden?
The total descent from man to the amoeba is an in-
comparably smaller interval. Yet that is a deep
dechvity; profound, but not infinite. Why this sud-
den jump from the altitude of man into infinity?
Are there no intermediate states of existence?
—
Perhaps on other planets, yes, bodily existence
on other planets is probable, not necessarily on any
planet of our solar system, but that is a trifle in the
visible universe; it is as our little five-roomed house
among all the dwellings of mankind. But why on
other planets only? Why bodily existence only?
Why think solely of those incarnate personalities
from whom, by exigencies of place, we are most iso-
lated? Because we feel more akin to such, and we
know of no others. A
good answer so far, and a
true. But do we wish to learn? Have we our
minds open? A
few men of science have adduced
evidence of intelligence not wholly inaccessible and

yet not familiarly accessible, intelligence perhaps a
part of ourselves, perhaps a part of others, intelli-
gence which seems closely connected with the region

of genius, of telepathy, of clairvoyance, to which I
have briefly referred.
Suppose for a moment that there were a God.
Science has never really attempted to deny His ex-
istence. Conceive a scientific God. How would He
work? Surely not by speech or by intermittent per-
sonal interference. He would be in, and among, and
of, the whole scheme of things. The universe is
governed by law effect is connected with cause ^ if a
; ;
thing moves it is because something moves it, ^ effects

are due and only due to agents. If there be guidance
or control, it must be by agents that it is exerted.
Then what in the scheme of things would be His
agents?
among such agents we must recognise our-
Surely
selves: we can at least consider how we and other
animals work. Watch the bird teaching its young to
fly, the mother teaching a child to read, the states-
man nursing the destiny of a new-born nation. Is
there no guidance there?
What meaning of legislation and municipal
is the
government, and acts of reform, and all the struggle
after better lives for ourselves and others?
Pure automatism, say some; an illusion of free will.
Possibly; but even a dream is not an absolute nonen-
1 If this involves controversy, then sequent with antecedent.
2 This I wish to maintain in spite of controversy.
—
THE RECONCILIATION S9
tity; the effort, however it be expressed or accounted

for, exists.
What is all the effort —^regarded scientifically
but the action of the totality of things trying to im-

prove itself, striving still to evolve something higher,
holier, and happier, out of an inchoate mass? There
may be many other ways of regarding it, but this is
one. Failures, mistakes, sins, — yes, they exist ; evolu-

tion would be meaningless if perfection were already
attained; but surely even now we see some progress,
surely the effort of our saints is bearing fruit. This
planet has labored long and patiently for the advent
of a human race, for millions of years it was the abode
of strange beasts, and now recently it has become the
abode of man. What but imperfection would you
expect? May it not be suggested that conscious evil
or vice loctms rather large in our eyes, oppresses us
with a somewhat exaggerated sense of its cosmic im-
portance, because it is peculiarly characteristic of the
human stage of development the lower animals
: know
little or nothing of it; they may indeed do things
which in men would be sinful, but that is just what
sin is —reversion to a lower type after perception of
a higher. The of crime, the active
consciousness
pursuit of degradation, does not arisetill something
like human intelligence is reached; and only a little
higher up it ceases again. It appears to be a stage

rather rapidly passed through in the cosmic scheme.
Greed, for instance, greed in the widest sense, accu-
mulation for accumulation's sake: it is a human
defect, and one responsible for much misery to-day;
—
but it arose recently, and abeady it is felt to be below

the standard of the race. A stage very little above
present humanity, not at above the higher grades
all
of present humanity, and we shall be free from it

again.
Let us be thankful we have got thus far, and
struggle on a little farther. It is our destiny, and
whether here or elsewhere it will be accomplished.
We
are God's agents, visible and tangible agents,
and we can help we ourselves can answer some kinds
;
of prayer, so it be articulate; we ourselves can inter-

fere with the course of inanimate nature, can make
waste places habitable and habitable places waste.
Not by breaking laws do we ever influence nature
we cannot break a law of nature, it is not brittle, we
only break ourselves if we try —but by obeying
them. In acordance with law we have to act, but act
we can and do, and through us acts the Deity.
And perhaps not alone through us. We are the
highest bodily organisms on this material planet, and
the material control of it belongs to us. It is subject
to the laws of Physics and to the laws of our minds
operating through our bodies. If there are other
beings near us they do not trespass. It is our sphere,
so far as Physics are concerned. Of any excep-
tions to this statement, stringent proof must be forth-
coming.
Assertions are made that under certain strange
but there
conditions 'physical interference does occur ;
is always a person of unusual type present when

these things happen, and until we know more of the
power of the unconscious human personality, it is

simplest to assume that these physical acts are due,
whether consciously, or unconsciously, to that person.
But what about our mental acts ? can operate We
on each other's minds through our physical envelope,
by speech and writing and in other ways, "but we can
do more it appears that we can operate at a distance,
:
by no apparent physical organ or medium; if by

mechanism at all, then by mechanism at present un-
known to us.
Supposing, then, that we are open to influence
from each other by non-corporeal methods, may we
not be open also to influence from beings belonging
to another order? And if so, may we not be aided,
inspired, guided, by a cloud of witnesses, —not wit-
nesses only, but helpers, agents like ourselves of the
immanent God?
How do we know that in the mental sphere these
cannot answer prayer, as we in the physical? It is
not a speculation only, it is a question for experience
to decide. Are we conscious of guidance ; do we feel
that prayers are answered? that power to do, and to
will, and to think, is given us? Many there are who
with devout thankfulness will say yes.
They attribute it to the Deity; so can we attribute
everything to the Deity, from thunder and lightning
down to daily bread ; but is it direct action ? Does He
not distribute the work among agents ? That is what
analogy suggests, but it is difficult to discriminate;
and it is not necessary; the whole is linked together,
"Bound by gold chains about the feet of God,"

—
and through it allHis energising Spirit runs. On

any hypothesis it must be to the Lord that we pray
to the highestwe know or can conceive but the answer ;
shall come in ways we do not know, and there must

always be a far Higher than ever we can conceive.
Religious people seem to be losing some of their
faith in prayer : they think it scientific not to pray in
the sense of simple petition. They may be right: it
may be the highest attitude never to ask for anything

specific, only for acquiescence. If saints feel it so,
they are doubtless right but, so far as ordinary

science has anything to say to the contrary, a more
childlike attitude might turn out truer, more in ac-
cordance with the total scheme. Prayer for a fancied
good that might really be an injury, would be foolish;
prayer for breach of law would be not foohsh only
but profane; but who are we to dogmatise too
positively concerning law? martyr may haveA
prayed that he should not feel the fire. Can it be
doubted that, whether through what we call hypnotic
suggestion or by some other name, the granting of it
was at least possible? Prayer, we have been told, is
a mighty engine of achievement, but we have ceased
to beheve it. Why should we be so incredulous?
Even in medicine, for instance, it is not really absurd
to suggest that drugs and no prayer may be almost as
foolish as prayer and no drugs. ^ Mental and phys-
1 Diseases are like weeds ; gardening is a bacteriological problem.
Some bacteria are good and useful and necessary; they act in digestion,
in manures, etc.; others are baleful and mean disease. The gardener,
like the physician, has to cultivate the plants and eradicate the weeds.
;
ical are interlocked. The crudities of "faith-healing"

have a germ of truth, perhaps as much truth as can
be claimed by those who condemn them. How do we
know that each is not ignoring one side, that each is
but half educated, each only adopting half measures ?
The whole truth may be completer and saner than the
sectaries dream more things may be
:
"wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of."
We are not bodies alone, nor spirits alone, but both

our bodies isolate us, our spirits unite us: if I may
venture on the construction of two lines, we are like
Floating lonely icebergs, our crests above the ocean,

With deeply submerged portions united by the sea.
The conscious part is knowing; the subconscious

part is ignorant yet the subconscious can achieve re-
:
sults the consciouscan by no means either understand

or perform. Witness the physical operations of "sug-
gestion" and the occasional lucidity of trance.
Each one of us has a great region of the sub-
If he ignores the existence of weeds and says they are all plants, he
speaks truth as a botanist, but is not a practical gardener. If he says,
"Gardening is all effort on my part, and nothing comes from the sky,
I will dig and I will water, I care not for casual rain or for sun," he
errs foolishly on one side. If he says, "The sun and the rain do every-
thing, there is no need for my exertion," he errs on the other side, and
errs more dangerously; because he can abstain from action, whereas he
cannot exclude rain and sun, however much he presumes to ignore them:
he ought to be a part of the agency at work. Sobriety and sanity con-
sist in recognising all the operative causes —
spiritual, mental, and ma-
terial.
—
conscious, to which we do not and need not attend:

only let us not deny it, let us not cut ourselves off
from its sustaining power. If we have instinct for
worship, for prayer, for communion with saints or
with Deity, let us trust that instinct, for there lies
the true realm of religion. We may try to raise the

subconscious region into the light of day, and study
it with our intellect also; but us not assume that
let
our present conscious intelligence is already so well

informed that its knowledge exhausts or determines
or bounds the region of the true and the impossible.
IV
As to what is scientifically possible or impossible,
anything not self -contradictory or inconsistent with
other truth is possible. Speaking from our present
scientific ignorance, and in spite of the extract from
Professor Tyndall quoted previously, this statement
must be accepted as literally true, for all we
know to the contrary. There may be reasons why
certain things do not occur: our experience tells us
that they do not, and we may judge that there is some
reason why they do not. There may be an adapta-
tion, an arrangement among the forces of nature
the forces of nature in their widest sense which en- —
chains them and screens us from their destructive
action; after the same sort of fashion as the atmos-
phere screens the earth from the furious meteoric
buffeting it would otherwise encounter on its portent-
ous journey through ever new and untried depths of

space/
We may indeed be well protected; we must, else
we should not be what is possible
here; but as to —
think of any lower creature, low enough in the scale
of existence to ignore us, and to treat us, too, as
among the forces of nature, and then let us bethink
ourselves of how we may appear, not to God or to any
infinite being, but to some personal intelligence high
above us in the scale of existence. Consider a colony
of ants, and conceive them conscious at their level;
what know they of fate and of the future? Much
what we know. They may think themselves governed
—
by uniform law uniform, that is, even to their un-
—
derstanding the march of the seasons, the struggle
for existence, the weight of the soil, the properties of
—
matter as they encounter it no more. For centuries
they may have continued thus; when one day, quite
unexpectedly, a shipwrecked sailor strolling round
kicks their ant-hill over. To and fro they run, over-
whelmed with the catastrophe. What shall hinder his
crushing them with his heel? Labor are est or are in
their case. Let them watch him and see, or fancy
that he sees, in their movements the signs of industry,
of system, of struggle against untoward circum-
stances; let him note the moving of eggs, the trying
to save and to repair —
the act of destruction may by
that means be averted.
1 The earth does not describe anything like a closed curve per annum;
the sun advances rather more than ten miles per second, in what is prac-
tically a straight line.
Just as our earth is midway among the lumps of

matter, neither small like a meteoric stone, nor
gigantic hke a sun, so may be the place we, the human
race, occupy in the scale of existence. All our ordi-
nary views are based on the notion that we are highest
in the scale; upset that notion and anything is possi-
ble. Possible, but we have to ascertain the facts not :
what might, but what does occur. Into the lives of

the lower creatures caprice assuredly seems to enter;
the treatment of a fly by a child is capricious, and may
be regarded as puzzhng to the fly. As wx rise in the
scale of existence we hope that things get better; we
have experience that they do. It may be said that
up to a point in the scale of life vice and caprice
increase that the lower organisms and the plant world
;
know nothing of them, and that man has been most

wicked of all but they reach a maximum at a certain
;
—
stage a stage the best of the human race have
—
already passed and we need not postulate either vice
or caprice in our far superiors. Men have thought
themselves the sport of the gods before now, but let
us hope they were mistaken. Such thoughts would
lead to madness and despair. We do not know the
laws which govern the interaction of diff*erent orders
of intelligence, nor do we know how much may de-
pend on our own attitude and conduct. It may be
that prayer is an instrument which can control or in-
fluence higher agencies, and by its neglect we may be ^
losing the use of a mighty engine to help on our lives

and those of others.
The Universe is huge and awful every way, we
might so easily be crushed by it; we need the help of

every agency available, and if we had no helpers we
should stand a poor chance. The loneliness of it when
we leave the planet would be appalling; sometimes
even here the loneliness is great.
What the "protecting atmosphere" for our disem-
bodied souls may be, I know not. Some may liken
the protection to the care of a man for a dog, of a
woman for a child, of a far-seeing minister for a race
of bewildered slaves while others may dash aside the
;
contemplation of all intermediate agencies, and feel

themselves safe and enfolded in the protecting love
of God Himself.
The region of true Religion and the region of a
completer Science are one.
CHAPTER III
RELIGION, SCIENCE AND MIRACLE

I. Science and Religion
rriHERE was a time when religious people dis-

A trusted the increase of knowledge, and con-
demned the mental attitude which takes delight in its
pursuit, being in dread lest part of the foundation

of their faith should be undermined by a too ruthless
and unqualified spirit of investigation.
There has been a time when men engaged in the
quest of systematic knowledge had an idea that the
results of their studies would be destructive not only
of outlying accretions but of substantial portions of
the edifice of religion which has been gradually
erected by the prophets and saints of humanity.
Both these epochs will soon belong to history.
Thoughtful men realise that truth is the important
thing, and that to take refuge in any shelter less sub-
stantial than the truth is to render themselves liable
to abject exposure when a storm comes on. Few are
not aware that it is a sign of unbalanced judgment
to conclude, on the strength of a few momentous
discoveries, that the whole structure of religious be-
lief, built up through the ages by the developing
48
RELIGION, SCIENCE AND MIRACLE 49
human from fundamental emotions and instincts

race
and experiences, is unsubstantial and insecure.
The business of Science, including in that term, for
present purposes, philosophy and the science of criti-
cism, is with foundations; the business of Religion is
with superstructure. Science has laboriously laid a

solid foundation of great strength, and its votaries
have rejoiced over it; though their joy must perforce
be somewhat dumb and inexpressive until the more
vocal apostles of art and literature and music are able
to decorate with their light and more winsome
it
tracery; so for the present the structure of science

strikes a stranger as severe and forbidding. In a
neighbouring territory Religion occupies a splendid
—
building a gorgeously-decorated palace; concerning
which. Science, not yet having discovered a satisfac-
tory basis, is sometimes inclined to suspect that it is
phantasmal and mainly supported on legend.
Without any controversy it may be admitted that
the foundation and the superstructure, as at present
known, are inadequately fitted together; and that
there is, in consequence, an apparent dislocation.
Men of science have exclaimed that all solid truth
is in their keeping; adopting in that sense the words
of the poet:
"To the solid ground
Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye."
On the other hand men of Religion snugly

ensconced in their traditional eyrie, and objecting to
the digging and the hammering below, have shud-
dered as the artificial props and pillars by which they

supposed it to be buttressed gave way one after
another; and have doubted whether they could
continue to enjoy peace in their exalted home if it
turned out that j)art of it was suspended in air, with-
out any perceptible foundation at all, like the
phantom city in "Gareth and Lynette" whereof it
could be said:
"the city is built
To music, therefore never built at all.
And therefore built for ever."
Remarks as to lack of solid foundation be re- may

garded as typical of the mild kind of sarcasm which
people with superficial smattering of popular science
sometimes try to pour upon religion. They think that
to accuse a system of being devoid of solid foundation
is equivalent to denying its stability. On the contrary,
as Tennyson no doubt perceived, the absence of any-

thing that may
crumble or decay, or be shaken by
an earthquake, a safeguard rather than a danger.
is
It is the absence of material foundation that makes

the Earth itself, for instance, so secure: if it were
based upon a pedestal, or otherwise solidly supported,
we might be anxious about the stability and dura-
bihty of the support. As it is, it floats securely in
the emptiness of space.
Similarly the persistence of its diurnal spin is se-
cured by the absence of anything to stop it not by any :
maintaining mechanism. *
To say that a system does not rest upon one special

fact is not to impugn its stability. The body of
:
scientific truth rests on no solitary material fact or

group of facts, but on a basis of harmony and con-
sistency between facts: its support and ultimate
sanction is of no material character. To conceive of
Christianity as built upon an Empty Tomb, or any
other plain physical or historical fact, is dangerous.
To base it upon the primary facts of consciousness
or upon direct spiritual experience, as Paul did, is
safer. ^ There are parts of the structure of Religion
which may safely be underpinned by physical science
the theory of death and of continued personal exist-
ence one of them; there are many others and there
is
will be more. But there are and always will be vast

religious regions for which that kind of scientific
foundation would be an impertinence, though a
scientific contribution is appropriate. Perhaps these
may be summed up some such phrase
in as "the rela-
tion of the soul to God."
Assertions are made concerning material facts in
the name ofreligion; these science is bound to
criticise.Testimony is borne to inner personal ex-
perience; on that physical science does well to be
silent. Nevertheless many
of us are impressed with
the conviction that everything in the universe may be-
come intelligible if we go the right way to work and
;
1 It will be represented that I am here intendinc; to cast doubt upon
a fundamental tenet of the Church. That is not mv intention. My con-

tention here is merely that a great structure should not rest upon a
point. So might a lawyer properly say: "To base a legal decision upon
—
the position of a comma, or other punctuation, however undisputed its
occurrence — is dangerous; to base it upon the general sense of a docu-
ment is safer."
SO we are coming to recognise, on the one hand, that

every system of truth must be intimately connected
with every other, and that this connection will con-
stitute a trustworthy support as soon as it is revealed
by the progress of knowledge and on the other hand,
;
that the extensive foundation of truth now being laid

by scientific workers will ultimately support a gor-
geous building of aesthetic f eehng and religious faith.
Theologians have been apt to be too easily satisfied
with a pretended foundation that would not stand
scientific scrutiny; they seem to believe that the re-
hgious edifice, with its mighty halls for the human
spirit, can rest upon some event or statement, instead
of upon man's nature as a whole and they are apt to

;
dechne to reconsider their formulae in the light of

fuller knowledge and development.
Scientific men, on the other hand, have been liable
to suppose that no foundation which they have not
themselves laid can be of a substantial character,
thereby ignoring the possibility of an ancestral
accumulation of sound through unformulated ex-
perience. And a few of the less considerate, about a
quarter of a century ago, amused themselves by in-
stituting a kind of jubilant rat-hunt under the ven-
erable theological edifice: a procedure necessarily
obnoxious to its occupants. The exploration was un-
pleasant, but its results have been purifying and
healthful, and the permanent substratum of fact will
in due time be cleared of the decaying refuse of
centuries.
Some of the more seriously conducted controversy
between the two contending parties turned upon

—
those frequently discussed topics the possibility of
the Miraculous, and the efficacy of Prayer. Let us
elaborate the thesis maintained in the last chapter,
by discussing further, though still briefly, these two
connected subjects.
II. Meaning of Miracle

We must begin by admitting that the term "mira-
cle" is ambiguous, and that no discussion which takes
that term as a basis can be very fruitful, since the
combatants may all be meaning different things.
1. One user of the term may mean merely an un-
usual event of which we do not know the history and

cause, a bare wonder or prodigy such an event as the
;
course of nature may, for all we know, bring about

once in ten thousand years or so, leaving no record of
its occurrence in the past and no anticipatory proba-
bility of its re-occurrence in the future. The raining

down of fire on Sodom, or on Pompeii the sudden en-
;
gulphing of Korah, or of Marcus Curtius, or, on a

different plane, the advent of some transcendent
genius, or even of a personality so lofty as to be
called divine, may serve as examples.
2. Another employer of the term "miracle" may
add to this idea a definite hypothesis, and may mean

an act due to unknown intelligent and living agencies
operating in a self-willed and unpredictable manner,
thus effecting changes that would not otherwise have
occurred and that are not in the regular course of
nature. The easiest example to think of is one
wherein the lower animals are chiefly concerned; for

instance, consider the case of the community of an
ant-hill, on a lonely uninhabited island, undisturbed
for centuries, whose dwellinc^ is kicked over one dav
by a sliipwrecked sailor. They had reason to suppose
that events were uniform, and all their difficulties
ancestrally known; but they are perturbed by an un-
iateUigible miracle. A different illustration is af-
forded by the presence of an obtrusive but unsus-
pected live insect iu a galvanometer or other measur-
ing instrimient in a physical laborator^^; whereby
metrical observations would be comphcated, and all
regularity- perturbed, in a puzzling and capricious
and, to half -instructed knowledge, supernatural, or
even diabohcal, manner. Xot dissimilar are some of
the asserted events in a Seance Room.
3. Another may use the term "miracle"
to mean the
unknown laws sav of healinsr or of com-
utilisation of
munication; laws unknown and unformulated, but
instinctivelyput into operation by mental acti^-ity of
—
some kind, sometimes through the unconscious in-
fluence of so-called self-suggestion, sometimes
through the activity of another mind, or tlirough the
personal agency of liighly gifted beings, operating
on others; laws whereby time and space appear tem-
porarily suspended, or extraordinary cures are ef-
fected, or other effects produced, such as the levita-
tions and other physical phenomena related of the
saints.
4. Another may incorporate ^vith the word "mira-
cle" a still further infusion of theorv, and mav mean
—
always a direct interposition of Divine Providence,

whereby at some one time and place a perfectly
unique occurrence is brought about, which is out of re-
lation with the established order of things, is not due to
what has gone before, and is not likely to occur again.
The most striking examples of what can be claimed
under this head are connected with the personality of
Jesus Christ, notably the Virgin Birth and the Empty
Tomb; by which I mean the more material and con-
troversial aspects of those generally accepted doc-
trines —the Incarnation and the Resurrection.
To summarise four categories are:
this part, the
(1) A natural or orderly though unusual portent,

(2) a disturbance due to unknown hve or capricious
agencies, (3) a utilisation by mental or spiritual
power of unknown laws, (4) direct interposition of
the Deity.
III. Arguments concerning the Miraculous.

In some cases an argument concerning the so-called
miraculous will turn upon the question whether such
things are theoretically possible.
In other cases it will turn upon whether or not
they have ever actually happened.
In a third case the argument will be directed to the
question whether they happened or not on some par-
ticular occasion.
And argument will hinge upon
in a fourth case the
the particular category under which any assigned oc-
currence is to be placed:
For instance, take a circumstance which undoubt-
edly has occurred, one upon the actual existence of

which there can be no dispute, and yet one of which
the history and manner is quite unknown. Take, for
instance, the origin of Life; or to be more definite,
say the origin of Kfe on any given planet, the Earth
for instance. There is practically no doubt that the
Earth was once a hot and molten and sterile globe.
There is no doubt at all that it is now the abode of an
inmiense variety of living organic nature. How did
that life arise? Is it an event to be placed under
head (1), as an unexpected outcome of the ordinary
course of nature, a development naturally following
upon the formation of extremely complex molecular
— —
aggregates protoplasm and the like as the Earth
cooled or must it be placed under head ( 4 ) as due to
; ,
the direct Fiat of the Eternal?

Again, take the existence of Christianity as a living
force in the world of to-day. This is based upon a
series of events of undoubtedly substantial truth cen-
tering round a historical personage under which cate-
;
gory is that to be placed? Was his advent to be re-

garded as analogous to the appearance of a mighty
genius such as may at any time revolutionise the
course of human history; or is he to be regarded as a
direct manifestation and incarnation of the Deity
Himself?
I am using these great themes as illustrations
merely, for our present purpose I have no intention
;
of entering upon them in this chapter. They are

questions which have been asked, and presumably an-
swered, again and again; and it is on lines such as
these that debates concerning the miraculous are

usually conducted. But what
want to say is that
I
so long as we keep the discussion on these lines, and
ask this sort of question, though we shall succeed in
emphasizing difficulties, we shall not progress far to-
wards a solution of any of them: nor shall we gain
much aid towards life.
IV. Law and Guidance

The way to progress is not thus to lose ourselves in
detail and in confusing estimates of possibilities, but
to consider two main issues which may very briefly be
formulated thus:
1. Are we to believe in irrefragable law?

2. Are we to believe in spiritual guidance?
If we affirm the first of these issues we accept an

orderly and systematic universe, with no arbitrary
cataclysms and no breaks in its essential continuity.
Catastrophes occur, but they occur in the regular
course of events, they are not brought about by capri-
cious and lawless agencies; they are a part of the
entire cosmos, regulated on the principle of unity and
uniformity: though to the dwellers in any time and
place, from whose senses most of the cosmos is hid-
den, they may appear to be sudden and portentous
dislocations of natural order.
So much granted if we accept the first of the
is
above If we accept the second, we accept a

issues.
purposeful and directed universe, carrying on its evo-
lutionary processes from an inevitable past into an

anticipated future with a definite aim; not left to the
random control of inorganic forces Uke a motor-car
which has lost its driver, but permeated throughout
by mind and intention and foresight and will. Not
mere energy, but constantly directed energy the —
energy being controlled by something which is not
energy, nor akin to energy, something which presum-
ably is immanent in the universe and is akin to life
and mind.
The alternative to these two beliefs is a universe of
random chance and capricious cosmos
disorder, not a
or universe at —a multiverse
all Consequently
rather.
I take it that we all hold to one or other of these two
behefs. But do we and can we hold to both?
So far as I conceive my present mission, it is to
urge that the two behefs are not inconsistent with
each other, and that we may and should contemplate
and gradually feel our way towards accepting both.
1. We must reahse that the Whole is a single

undeviating law-saturated cosmos;
2. But we must also realise that the Whole con-
sists not of matter and motion alone, nor
yet of spirit and will alone, but of both and
all; we must even yet further, and enor-
mously, enlarge our conception of what the
Whole contains.
Scientific men have preached the first of these de-

siderata, but have been hable to take a narrow view
regarding the second. Keenly alive to law, and

knowledge, and material fact, they have been occa-
sionally blind to art, to emotion, to poetry, and to the
higher mental and spiritual environment which in-
spires and glorifies the realm of knowledge.
The temptation of rehgious men has also lain in the
direction of too narrow exclusiveness
for they have
;
been so occupied with their own conceptions of

the fulness of things that they have failed to grasp
what is implied by a strictly orderly cosmos. They
have allowed the emotional content to overpower
the intellectual, and have too often ignored, disliked,
and an integral portion of the
practically rejected,
scheme, —appearing what no one can really
to desire,
wish for, a world of uncertainty and caprice, where
effects can be produced without adequate cause, and
where the connection of antecedent and consequent
can be arbitrarily dislocated.
The same error has therefore dogged the steps of
both classes of men. An acceptance of miracle, in
the crude sense of arbitrary intervention and special
providence, is appropriate to those who feel strangled
in the grip of inorganic and mechanical law, with-
out being able to reconcile it with the idea of friendly
guidance and intelligent control. And a denial of

miracle, in every sense, that is of all providential lead-
ing,and all controlling intelligence, may be the out-
come of the same kind of inability in people of dif-
ferent temperament, —people who cannot recognise a
and order,
directing intelligence in the midst of law
who regard the absence of dislocation and inter-
ference as a mark of the inorganic, the mechanical,

the inexorable. Wherefore the denial of miracle has
often led to a sort of practical atheism and to an as-
sertion of the valuelessness of prayer.
But to those who are able to combine the acceptance
of both the above faiths, prayer is part of the orderly
cosmos, and may be an efficient portion of the guid-
ing and controlling will; somewhat as the desire of the
inhabitants of a town for a civic improvement may be
a part of the agency which ultimately brings it about,
no matter whether the city be representatively or au-
tocratically governed.
The two beliefs cannot be logically and effectively
combined by those who think of themselves as some-
thing detached from and outside the cosmos, operat-
ing on it externally and seeking to modify its mani-
festations by vain petitions addressed to a system of
ordered force. To such persons the above proposi-
tions must seem contradictory or mutually exclusive.
But if we can grasp the idea that we ourselves are an
intimate part of the whole scheme, that our wishes
and desires are a part of the controlhng and guiding
will, —then our mental action cannot but be efficient,
if we exercise it in accordance with the highest and

truest laws of our being.
V. Miracle and Science

How mind can
act on matter at all is at present a
puzzle. Life is clearly the intermediary, and a live
thing can perform actions and bring about changes in
the material world that cannot be predicted by me-
chanics and that would not otherwise have occurred.

There have been many who beheve that such changes
affect the conservation of energy, and render that
law doubtful, unless hfe itself be one of the forms
of energy. But my contention is that life is, from
the mechanical point of view, not a force nor an
energy, but only a guiding and directing influence:
affecting the quantity of energy no whit. It directs
terrestrial energy along a certain channel, it utilises
the energies which are running to waste, so to speak,
and guides them in a specific way as a waterfall may
;
be made to light a town instead of merely dashing

itself picturesquely against rocks.
*
This subject of 'guidance" is a large one, and I
must be brief. I have dealt with it in my book on

Life and Matter; but it is a point of fundamental im-
portance, and I will try to exhibit it still more clearly
and illustrate what I mean by guidance, namely, the
influencing of activity without "work," the direction
of energy without generating it, the utilising and
guiding existent activity for preconceived and pur-
posed ends. To show that work is not necessary for
guidance even in mechanics, we may instance the fol-
lowing :
A railway guides a train to its destination; while

the engine supplies the energy and propels it. Any
force exerted by the rails is perpendicular to the mo-
tion and does no work; unless, indeed, by friction it
exerts a retarding force not perpendicular to motion.

But if this be used as a parable it may be objected
that the exertion of force is itself a mechanical oper-
ation,even though no work is done and that a force ;
cannot act without altering the distribution of mo-

mentum, though must leave the amount unaltered.
it
Quite true, action and reaction are always equal

and opposite, and both are always to be found in the
physical world. Life may call out a stress in that
world which would not otherwise exist then and
there but it sustains none of the reaction never does
; —
it exert an unbalanced force, never does it generate
—
any momentum ^no more than it generates energy.
It only directs operations which thoroughly obey the
laws of mechanics, and from the mechanical point of
view are complete in the physical world.
Life and mind have determined where the rails
shall be laid down, and when and whence and whither
the trains are to be run, but the}^ exert no iota of
force upon them; so the distinction between a pro-
pelling and a deflecting force is a needless distinction
for our present purposes. Whenever a force is ex-
erted it is exerted as a stress between two bodies,
whether it be a working or a guiding force.
But, for the kind of guidance exercised by hfe,
force, through a common intermediary, is not a neces-
sary one. A
path can guide a traveller to his destina-
tion without exerting any force upon him at all.
Conversely, a railway time-table, emanating from the
Traffic Manager's office, determines the running of
many trains but it is not a form of energy, nor does
;
it exert force.
The liberation of energy can be accomplished by
work entirely incommensurate with the result and so :
RELIGION, SCIENCE AND MIRACLE 6$
ultimately it would appear that can be achieved by

it
none at all, through the mysterious intervention of the

brain as a connector between the psychical and phys-
ical worlds, which otherwise would not be in touch.
All that a human being can do is to get some of
the energy from the outside world into his muscles
by the act of feeding; and when there it is amenable
to nerve messages sent from his brain, and so ulti-
—
mately from his mind, ^which apparently has the
power of liberating detents and pulling triggers in
that strange physiological link with another order of
existence. How the brain acts: how a thought or an
act of will can liberate the energy of a brain cell in a
particular direction : is not yet known. It belongs to
the mysterious borderland between physics and psy-
chology. We can only appeal to the fact of con-
sciousness, and illustrate it by saying that a trigger
can precipitate an explosion, of violence quite incom-
mensurable with that of the energy required to pull
the trigger; and the work done in pulling the trigger
results in infinitesimal local heat, of just the same
magnitude whether the prepared explosion results or
not: it is independent also of the direction and the
epoch of the shot. The aim, and the moment at which
to pull the trigger, are determined by the mind of the
sportsman, without affecting the question of energy.
Life is not energy, but it is the director of energy,
and of matter. It achieves results which would not
otherwise have occurred. Even plant life docs that,
the green leaves direct the energy of sunshine to the
decomposition and re-invigoration of thoroughly
burned and stable compounds, carbonic acid and

water.
Engineering and architectural operations produce
Forth Bridges, and tunnels, and buildings of a char-
acter instinct mth mind and purpose. The organic
energy needed for the operation is brought by the
nav^des in their tin cans, and they direct that energy
so as to exert propulsive force and do the work; but
the controlling mind is that of the architect and the
engineer.
The only thing that prevents our calling it a miracle
is that we are so thoroughly accustomed to the occur-
rence.
Mind Life directs. The material and
determines.
energetic universe dominated and controlled by
is
these agencies; which utilise the energy they find

available, and direct it into appropriate channels.
Finally, whatever difficulties we may feel about
understanding the process, we ought not to be accused
of dualism by reason of our insistence on the separate
categories of life and mind on the one hand, and
body and mechanism on the other. However domi-
nant one of these predicaments may be over the other,
they may be all ultimately but parts of some compre-
hensive whole. Domination or even antagonism be-
tween the parts of a whole is conmion enough. One
man can dominate or can oppose another, although
both are members of the same race, nation, or family.
The head can dominate a limb, though both are parts
of a single body. So also can jNIind and Life domi-
nate and transcend matter and energy. And they do
even though in some ultimate

this just as effectually,
monistic unity they can be all recognised as parts or
aspects of some one stupendous Reality.
VI. Miracle and Religion
So much for general considerations, which in this

case are by far the most important; we may now de-
scend to a few practical remarks. When speaking of
miracles, what people are usually interested in are
miracles in detail; they have usually some special in-
stances in their minds, and they want those instances
discussed. Using the term "miracle" in quite a popu-
lar sense, and meaning by it nothing defined or sus-
ceptible of definition, but simply the of miracles list
they find recorded in the Bible or in the lives of the

Saints, they ask, "Has the progress of science rend-
ered the occurrence of these things more or less prob-
able?" The first and obvious answer, —that it has
rendered them subjectively less probable, that is to
say, less easy of acceptance than they were at the time
of their record, or even fifty years ago, — is too mani-
fest to require giving. For till recently they were
hardly questioned, except here and there by a few
adventurous spirits who were liable to be stigmatised
as "infidel" for being faithful to their convictions.
But if the subjective aspect is passed by as too ob-
vious, and if it is asked whether science has made the
occurrence of the so-called miracles objectively more
reasonably probable, — it is controversial, but
—not
it is
absurd, to answer concerning several of them "in

—
66 SCIEN'CE AND FAITH
some respects, yes" :
—an answer wliich most readily
is
applicable to the miracles of healing. And why Be- ?
cause in modern medical practice, especially as devel-

oped on the Continent, some of these occurrences can
be imitated to-day; for instance, the production, by
self or other suggestion, of wounds analogous to the
"stigmata." ^'Miether this fact, assuming it for the
moment to be a fact, is one to be welcomed or other-
T\ise by interpreters of Holy Writ, is a question for
themselves to answer.
The reasonable scientific ^îew is that a complete
knowledge of nature would enable us to recognise the
rationale of every event which ever occurred, or ever
can occur and so it would seem to follow concerning
;
—
any given apparent prodig}' either that it did not
happen as related, or else that it happened in accord-
ance with natural laws of wliich at present we are
more or less ignorant. Some of the popularly-quoted
happen, and were never by
mii'acles certainly did not
competent judges really thought to have happened, as
narrated by the poet or rhapsodist of the time. To
regard the poetic suspension of the motion of the sun
(or earth) as a scientific statement is absurd. But
while it is mere illiteracy to suppose that all classes
of recorded miracle represent statements of fact

since careful precision in recording fact is a rather
modern accomphslmient, and not hkely to be regarded
then, nor in some quarters even now, as a particularly
desirable or edif^îng accomplislmient, yet certain of
them may be worthy of consideration, as at any rate
believed by the recorder to have occurred as he states
them; and, besides, as not being wholly outside the

range of conceivable possibility.
But in so far as they are recognised as reasonably
possible, they surely lose their power as specifically
religious evidence,and become merely a hint towards
an extension of scientific fact. I suppose it must be
admitted that the more natural and so to speak com-
monplace an event becomes, the less exceptional re-
ligious significance can be accorded to it. Neverthe-
less it may be legitimate to recognise that a human
being of specially lofty character may, perhaps inevi-
tably, be endowed with and powers beyond
faculties
the present scope of the race: faculties and powers
fully intelligible neither to himself nor to anyone else.
Even a genius has an inkling of exceptional powers.
No one can explain, or render ordinarily probable a
priori,, the existence of a child-prodigy capable of per-
formances in music or in arithmetic beyond the power

of nearly all adults. Genius combined with sainthood
may achieve what to ordinary men are marvels and
miracles. Even without sainthood, and without
genius, some abnormally constituted species of the
human race —possibly anticipating future develop-
ment as a kind of premature sport, or possibly dis-
playing the remains of ancestral powers now nearly
lost to the race —are found to possess faculties un-
usual and incredible, faculties which in fact are widely
and vigorously disbelieved by nearly all who have not
studied them.
Whether a given prophet has extraordinary power,
and how far his power extends, is a matter for evi-
dence but whatever his power, it is by the content of

;
his message that he is to be judged, not by some ac-

companying extension of the customary control of
mind over matter. All this is well-worn ground, and
I refrain from emphasising a great number of obvious
contentions, e.g,, that it is quite wrong to accept a bad
and immoral message because it is accompanied by
conjuring tricks of amazing ingenuity; and the like.
The worst of men can do things beyond the power of
an insect, things which to its consciousness, if it had
any, would be miraculous.
Either there are modes of existence higher than
that displayed by our ordinary selves, or there are not.
If there are, it is the business of science to ascertain
their existence and what they can do in the way of
interaction with our material surroundings: it is not
necessarily the business of religion at though like
all,
everything else it will have a bearing on religion.

But, because it is a nascent and infantile branch of
science, is it therefore of little importance or small
interest? By no means. All these things are essen-
tially worthy of investigation, and they will be in-
vestigated by those who feel called to the work,
although they are looked at askance by some of the
scientific magnates of to-day. The gain of realising
that they are unessential to religion and to human
hopes and fears, is that their investigation can be
conducted in a cool calm spirit, without prejudice
and without preconception, with no object in view
but simple ascertainment of truth. The atmosphere
of religion should be recognised as enveloping and
permeating everything, and should not be specially

or exclusively sought as an emanation from signs and
wonders.
Strange and ultranormal things may happen, and
are well worthy of study, but they are not to be re-
garded as especially holy. Some of them may repre-
sent either extension or survival of human faculty,
while others may be an inevitable endowment or at-
tribute of a sufficiently lofty character; but none of
them can be accepted without investigation. Testi-
mony concerning such things is to be treated in a
sceptical and yet open-minded spirit; the results of
theory and experiment are to be utihsed, as in any
other branch of natural knowledge; and indiscrim-
inate dogmatic rejection is as inappropriate as whole-
sale uncritical acceptance.
The bearing on the hopes and fears of humanity
of such unusual facts as can be verified may be con-
siderable, but they bear no exceptional witness to
guidance and control. Guidance and control, if ad-
mitted at all, must be regarded as constant and con-
tinuous; and it is just this uniform character that
makes them so difficult to recognise. It is always
difficult to perceive or apprehend anything which is
perfectly regular and continuous. Those fish, for
instance, which are submerged in ocean-depths, be-
yond the reach of waves and tides, are probably
utterly unconscious of the existence of water; and,
however can have but little reason
intelligent, they
to believe in that medium, notwithstanding that their
whole being, life, and motion, is dependent upon it
from instant to instant. The motion of the earth,

—
again, furious rush though it is fifty times faster
—
than a cannon ball is quite inappreciable to our
senses; it has to be inferred from celestial observa-
tions, and it was strenuously disbeheved by the ag-
nostics of an earher day.
Uniformity is always difficult to grasp our senses —
are not made for it; and yet it is characteristic of
ever}i:hing that is most efficient. Jerks and jolts are
easy to appreciate, but they do not conduce to prog-
ress. Steady motion is what conveys us on our way,
colhsions are but a retarding influence. The seeker
after miracle, in the exceptional and narrow or exclu-
sive sense, is pining for a catastrophe the investigator
;
of miracle, in the continuous and broad or compre-

hensive sense, has the universe for a laboratory.
VII. Human Experience

Let us survey our position.
We find ourselves for a few score years incarnate
intelligences on this planet; we have not always been
here, and we always be here we are here in
shall not :
fact, each of but a very short period; but we

us, for
can study the conditions of existence while here, and
we perceive clearly that a certain amount of guidance
and control are in our hands. For better for worse
we can, and our legislators do, influence the destinies
of the planet. The process is called "making his-
tory." We can all, even the humblest, to some extent
influence the destinies of individuals with whom we

come into contact. We have therefore a certain sense
of power and responsibility.
It is not likely that we are the only, or the highest,
intelligent agents in the whole wide universe, nor
that we possess faculties and powers denied to all
else; nor is it hkely that our own activity will be
always as limited as it is now. The Parable of the
Talents is full of meaning, and it contains a meaning
that is not often brought out.
It is absurd to deny the attributes of guidance and
intelligenceand personality and love to the Whole,
seeing that we are part of the Whole, and are per-
sonally aware of what we mean by those words in
ourselves. These attributes are existent therefore,
and cannot be denied; cannot be denied even to the
Deity.
Is the planet subject to intelligent control? We
know that it is: we ourselves can change the course
of rivers for predestined ends,we can make highways,
can unite oceans, can de\dse inventions, can make
new compounds, can transmute species, can plan
fresh variety of organic life; we can create works of
art; we can embody new ideas and lofty emotions in
forms of language and music, and can leave them as
Platonic offspring ^ to remote posterit3^ Our power
is doubtless limited, but we can surely learn to do
far more than we have yet so far in the infancy of

humanity accomplished; more even than we have yet
conjectured as within the range of possibility.
^Symposium, 209.
72 SCIENXE AXD FAITH
Our progress already has been considerable. It is
but a moderate time since our greatest men were chip-

ping flints and caning bones into the likeness of
reindeer. became able to build
]VIore recently they
cathedrals and make ]3oems. Xow we are momenta-
rily diverted from immortal pursuits by vivid interest
in that kind of competition wliich has replaced the
competition of the sword, and by those extraordinary
inequahties of possession and privilege which have
resulted from the invention of an indestructible and
transmissible form of riches, a form over wliich
neither moth nor rust has any power. We raise an
increase of smoke, and offer sacrifices of squalor
and ugliness, in worsliip of tliis new idol. But it will
pass human Hf e is not meant to continue as it is now
;
in city slums nor is the strenuous f utihty of mere ac-

;
cumulation likely to satisfy people when once they

have been really educated; the world is beautiful, and
may be far more widely happy than it has been yet.
Those who have preached this hitherto have been
heard with deaf ears, but some day we shall awake to
a sense of our true planetary importance and shall
recognise the higher possibihties of existence. Then
shall we realiseand practically beheve what is in-
volved in those words of poetic insight:
The heaven, even the heavens are the Lord's: but the earth hath
He given to the children of men.
There is a vast truth in this yet to be discovered;

power and influence and responsibihty lie before us,
appalling m their magnitude, and as yet we are but
children playing on the stage before the curtain is
up for the drama in which we are to take part.

rolled
But we are not left to our own devices: we of this
living generation are not alone in the universe. What
we call the individual is strengthened by elements
emerging from the social whole out of which he is
born. We are not things of yesterday, nor of to-

morrow. We do not indeed remember our past, we
are not aware of our future, but in common with
everything else we must have had a past and must be
going to have a future. Some day we may find our-
selves able to reahse both.
Meanwhile, what has been our experience here?
We have not been left solitary. Every newcomer to
the planet, however helpless and strange he be, finds
friends awaiting him, devoted and self-sacrificing
and protect liis infancy and
friends, eager to care for
to train him in the ways of this curious world. It is
typical of what goes on throughout conscious exist-
ence; the guidance which we exert, and to which we
are subject now, but a phase of something running
is
through the universe. And when the time comes for

us to quit this sphere and enter some larger field of
action, I doubt not that we shall find there also that
kindness and help and patience and love, without
which no existence would be tolerable or even at some
stages possible.
Miracles he all around us onty they are not mirac-
:
ulous. Special providences envelop us: only they are

not special. Prayer is a means of communication as
natural and as simple as is speech.
Realise that you are part of a. great orderly and

mutually helpful cosmos, that you are not stranded
or isolated in a foreign universe, but that you are part
of it and closely akin to it and your sense of sympa-
;
thy will be enlarged, your power of free communica-

tion will be opened, and the heartfelt aspiration and
communion and petition that we call prayer will come
as easily and as naturally as converse with those
human friends and relations whose visible bodily pres-
ence gladdens and enriches your present life.
1
SECTION II— CORPORATE WORSHIP
AND SERVICE
n
CHAPTER IV
THE ALLEGED INDIFFERENCE OF LAYMEN

TO RELIGION
THE average layman of the present day

accused of being* indifferent to religion.
is often
But
the allegation as worded seems to me untrue, unless
by "laymen" is understood the great mass of the peo-
ple. Even then I doubt if they are indifferent to
real religion, or to reality and sincerity and lofty-
mindedness of any kind. No one can be really in-
different to the great problem of existence —
the mys-
teries of life and death and of human destiny. It is
doubtful whether people in general can be considered
indifferent even to theology, of a sort, —
^not to prob-
lems connected with apparent oppositions between

knowledge and faith, for instance, nor to questions
of Biblical interpretation and the nature of Inspira-
tion. They are not unopen to the influence of a
saintly life, or disposed to treat lightly such funda-
mental subjects as the existence of Deity and the rela-
tions between man and God.
I gather that they are not indifferent in this coun-
try to these topics, because they seem always willing
to read about them or to discuss them. And if this
refers chiefly to the more educated classes, it may be
maintained on behalf of the masses that their ap-
parently perennial excitement about what doctrines
77
78 CORPORATE WORSHIP AND SERVICE
shall be taught to small children, though it may lad
lucidity, seems to argue an}i:hing but indifference.
In Germany and France, so far as I can judge,
people in general do not care in the same way to dis-
cuss religious questions, and theological magazines
are confined to speciahsts there ; is httle ornothing of
general interest and mde circulation on the subject.
In those countries minds seems closed, either in the
positive or in the negative direction, as regards re-
ligious beliefs. But here it is otherwise, and I have
heard it maintained at a discussion society that there
was reaUy nothing except religion and politics which
was worth the trouble of getting excited about.
Nevertheless there is a sense in which people in this
country are indifferent to something allied to religion
— at any rate to its outward and visible manifesta-
tions. To Ecclesiasticism they are indifferent, and
they do not in any great number go to church. I take
the allegation which is here being dealt wdth to intend
to ask the question. Why is this? Why have the out-
ward and visible forms of religion lost hold ^ of both
educated and uneducated people?
I believe that over-pressure is one answer a gen- —
eral sense of the shortness of life and the immense
amount there is to be done in it. This holds true
whether the press of occupation is caused by the de-
mands of pleasure, or of business, or of investigation,
1 1 say "lost" hold, because I suppose I may assume, from the churches
which they erected, as well as from the example of truly Roman Catholic
countries at the present day, that, in say the t^-elfth century, observance
of the outward forms of religion once really had a firm grasp of th©
majority of Englishmen.
INDIFFERENCE OF LAYMEN TO RELIGION 79
or of work for the public weal. In each case time is

all too short for what can now be crowded into it. As
soon as our faculties are well developed, and our in-

fluence fairly active, it is almost time to begin to
think of being called to service elsewhere, —there is
no leisure toexpend in unprofitable directions.

Is going to church unprofitable, then? To some
men often yes; to others, I suppose, always no: save
in the sense that they have not profited by it. Perhaps
to none is it quite unprofitable, but they may think it
so. If it acted as a stimulus and an inspiration and a
help to life, then surely people in general would not
be so foolish as to be indifferent to it. But they may
be mistaken this
; is and high
the age of strenuousness
pressure, and it may be that a quiet two hours of
peaceful meditation would be the very best sedative
and rest-cure for many men whose activities are wear-
ing them out. Some, and those the most strenuous
of all, have found it so. Mr. Gladstone, for instance,
was a studious attendant at public worship, and I
should not be surprised to hear that the German Em-
peror and President Roosevelt are so likewise; possi-
bly in their case partly as an example, but also quite
possibly as a private solace.
One cannot but admire men, to whom every five
minutes is of value, who thus give up large tracts of
time to religious exercises and it is possible that many
;
active men who ignore this help would be the better

in every way if they too submitted themselves to the
same discipline. It may be one of those cases where
more haste is the less speed, and where the pubhc as-
sembling of ourselves together in a reverent and wor-
shipful spirit would be a real contribution to vitality
and power. Under certain conditions I feel sure that
it would be so, but is it so under present conditions?
The answer must depend partly on individual tem-

perament, partly on the form of "service" available.
We must all be acquainted with the soothed and
sympathetic f eehng which is sometimes the result of
attendance at a place of worship in company with
others, even if nothing particular has been said worth
carrying away this is felt especially if the occasion is
:
—
a symboUc one a national thanksgiving, for instance,
a demonstration of religious feeling by members of a
scientific body, or other occasion of that kind; but if
it is a mere everyday or weekly service, there must be
some special harmony or congruity between the as-

sembly and the words that have been said, or the
ceremonies that have been performed, in order that
the effect may be produced.
There appear to be some ecclesiastically minded
persons who can derive sustenance from what to
others may seem extraordinarily commonplace, or
even childish, proceedings. I have seen Mr. Glad-
stone (the name of so great a man may be employed
as illustration without impertinence) in an attitude
—
of rapt and earnest attention, not to the words of
the Bible, which anyone might be glad to hear, nor
to the words of the Prayer Book, which to those with
a strongly-developed historic sense maj^ carry with
them a world of half- felt emotion —
^but to the utter-
ance from the pulpit of a very ordinary discourse.
T«5 most of us, however, this patient self -contribution

to what is going on is denied and the f eehng with
;
which some go away from an average place of wor-

ship is too often a feeling of irritation and regret for
wasted time.
I have known men of energy supply the needed
intellectual exercise, and contrive to stimulate their
historic sense, by using a Latin Prayer Book and a
Greek Testament and something of the sort is sorely
;
needed if one is to attempt to keep one's attention

fixed on the ancient formularies, so familiar from
childhood, and recited or chanted in so meaningless a
manner.
The greater number of men, I believe, cultivate
the habit of inattention during the greater part of
the proceedings; and it is possible, though less easy,
to preserve an attitude of mental inattention even
when reciting formularies with the lips. To attend
strenuously to the meaning of the clauses, in a creed,
for instance, or even in the Lord's Prayer, is an effort.
I do not believe it is often made. The words are
slipped through, and if an idea is caught every now
and again, that is all that can be expected. There
was a time when this inattentive recital of the well-
known and familiar could be tolerated and before the ;
days of education it was probably useful. To some it

may be useful still — to others it is tedious. The fact
is, the conventional English Church Service, or eclec-
tic admixture of combined services, is too long, and,
as I think, too mechanical. The Psalter as a whole
is oppressively tedious —I speak for myself; many
of the chants one is weary of. The jewels would
shine out more brightly if re-set. Some of the pray-
ers are beautiful, or would be if they were properly
read and were not spoiled by such frequent iteration.
The little song at the end of each commandment is
gorgeous when one hears it in the Elijah^ but it gets
tiresome at the ninth repetition. The "Confession"
is historically interesting and sometimes perhaps ap-
propriate, but as a rule it is excessive and unreal and ;
if ever true, it is not a thing one wishes to sing in

public, nor indeed to sing at to pay a few
all, still less
illiterate boys and men monotone for one.

to sing or
The Te Deum, on a national occasion, and sung
slowly and emphatically, may be magnificent: as or-
dinarily treated it is almost useless, and seems only
inserted as a convenient break between the Lessons;
save occasionally when the setting and singing are
specially good, in which case it can be enjoyed as an
oratorio is enjoyed.
Some people may be able to utilise parts of the
service which to others are tedious, andbe con-
it may
tended that there is something for everybody; but
for most people there must be long spells of dulness.
Length, however, is not the only objection: rapid-
ity, which is perhaps a consequence of length, is an-
other. Constantly and rapidly repeated formularies

must surely tend to become mechanical. jeer at We
the Thibetan water-worked prajdng-wheel as a
mechanical form of prayer; and yet I can imagine a
peasant joyfully going on with his labour in the
fields, in the consciousness that his prayer was being
periodically turned up to heaven by the forces of

nature, and his soul might send an aspiration after it,
without interfering with the industry of his body. I
doubt if such a ritual is really more mechanical than
some English services which I have attended. I know
—
well that any liturgy the bleakest as well as the most
—
ornate can elevate the soul of the truly pious; but
this minority cannot be included among the laity of
whom indifference to religion is even alleged.
As to the recital of a few incredible articles in
the creeds, I say nothing they are not numerous, and
:
hardly act as a strong deterrent except to a few ear-

nest souls; if there were reality about the procedure,
some of the clauses would be repellent, but as it is,
the so-called Athanasian hymn can be chanted
through with the rest: it is an interesting glimpse
into an ingenious mediaeval mind, to whom all the
mystery of Divinity was expressible in words, with
great positiveness of assurance, and with arithmetical
precision of specification. But so far as the Creeds
and the Articles contain things to which we and our
teachers, the beneficed clergy, are expected to adhere,
they may be to some extent deterrent and it must be
;
admitted that they require a good deal of explana-

tion, and in manner of expression are rather out of
date.
With all the enthusiasm for religion in the world,
I would say to professional Churchmen, you reall}^
cannot continue to expect people to wade continually

through so much mediaeval and ecclesiastical lore.
You must free the ship of official religion from in-
crustation: it is water-logged and overburdened now,
and its sails are patched and outworn. I do not ask
you to use steam orany new-fangled mode of pro-
pulsion. By all means keep your attachment to the
past, but study reahty and sincerity; strive to say
what you really mean, and to say it in such way that
others may know that you mean it, and may feel that
they mean it too. The American Church has modi-
fied some of the features characteristic of the Angli-
can Liturgy; and its authorised Prayer Book contains
interesting mijior variations ; all of which are devised
in the interests of elasticity and freedom, yet subject
to a commendable spirit of conservatism.
I trust that not an inseparable concomitant of
it is
a State rehgion that petitions should be tied and

bound in rigid forms, that no audible prayer can be
uttered except what is printed and authorised; it is
pitiful when the only initiation permitted, even at

times of stress, lies in the emphasis which may be
thrown upon certain words, and the pauses that may
be made after them. But at least the sermon is free.
So let preachers realise their opportunities and make
use of them, and let them no longer throw away their
chance of moving the hearts of men towards a higher
and more useful and unselfish hf e, by over-attention
to the conventional arrangement called the Church's
Year. The annual commemoration of everything is
often made an excuse for laziness: it saves the trou-
ble of choosing a subject. It provides a hackneyed
theme ready to hand, to be treated in a conventional
and hackneyed manner. Silently and patiently the

people sit there, and are not fed.
Religion is one thing; Church services as often
conducted are quite another thing. Modification
will be resentedand opposed by some singularly
minded lay Churchmen ; nevertheless, if more eminent
ability is to be attracted to the service of the Church,
if the great body of the laity are to be reached in any
serious and effective manner, modifications, excisions,
and reforms are necessary. It is not religion to which
people are indifferent.
—
CHAPTER V
UNION AND BREADTH
A Plea for Essential Unity Amid Formal Dif-

ference IN A National Church
"The true tragedy is a conflict of right with right, not of right with
wrong." Hegel.
ISOOX became aware that my little book called

The Substance of Faith could hardly be re-
garded as an eirenicon in respect of the present Eng-
Ush Education controversy, though I began some- it
what mth that hope, and still think that it should be

of some assistance in that direction for it is apparent
;
that the dispute between Church and Dissent is not

only of long standing historically, but is intrinsically
deepseated. It would be worth a considerable effort
if the inflammation due to that chronic sore could be
reduced; but the cure should be attempted, not by
blinking or denying the reality of the differences, but
rather by facing them resolutely and understanding
their nature and origin before seeking to prescribe a
remedy.
The dispute which is most alive to-day between
State Church and Free Churches is not exactly re-
ligious seems to be rather ethnological or anthropo-
: it
logical. is to say, it may be held to represent a

That
difference inherent in the varied nature of humanity,
B6,
UNION AND BREADTH 87
and to correspond to the divergent views taken of re-

ligion by two different types of mind. If there is
any truth in this statement, it ought surely to be pos-
sible to recognise the fact, and to adjust our arrange-
ments to it, as to any other of the facts of nature.
It must have been frequently pointed out before
— ^but sometimes statements bear and need repetition
— that there are two chief religious types: one type

valuing ceremony and artistic accessories and human
organisation and intervention; while the other,
thinking itself competent to dispense with what it
may consider adventitious aids, seeks to worship,
neither in temple nor even in mountain, but directly
in spirit and in truth. This one thinks that the Holy
Spirit is equally accessible to every individual. That
one conceives that a Special Power is miraculously
transmitted by ceremonial means, namely, by the im-
position of hands.
Those who take this which may be called the Apos-
tolic view, necessarily exalt the Church, which to them
is God's vicegerent upon earth for its priests possess
;
a power denied not only to laymen but to ministers

of all other denominations, who in this essential re-
spect are and must be regarded as laymen. It is true
that the branches of the Cathohc and Apostohc
Church do not agree among themselves entireh^ as to
the authentic channels of this mysterious influence.
To the Roman, the Anglican Catholic is a layman,
even though he be a prelate.^ To the Anglican, tlie
1 The question of the recognition or non-recognition of Anghcan Or-
President of the Wesley an Conference, or the IMod-
erator of the Presbyterian Synod, be in friend- may
ship a brother, and in good works a helper, but he has
no claim to recognition as a priest: nor, indeed, does
he prefer such a claim, because he does not belong to
the type wliich appreciates the idea of Divine influ-
ence ceremonially conveyed from one human being
to another.
But the distinction of t}ê is not confined to the
clergy : it runs through the laity likewise. Those w^ho
believe in the special and exclusive character of eccle-
siastical priesthood are bound to venerate the Officers
invested with those powers, and to submit to their
teaching and influence, irrespective of their person-
ality; for they can not only help and strengthen you
by administration of the Sacraments: they actually
have the power of forgiving your sins, or, still more —
remarkable, of preventing the forgiveness of your
sins, if thejT- be so minded.
Baptismal regeneration is only one of the things
which can be efl*ected thiôugh their agency, but that
too is a power of great magnitude, and if your child
is to be eternally lost without their aid their aid must
be sought for in this ceremony he is made, according

;
to the Catechism —
not recognised only and admitted
into the Church as such, but actually made a child —
of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of Heaven.^
ders is sometimes said to have been decided like a move in a game or
in party politics — after private discussion as to which course was best
calculated to benefit one side and to damage the other. The subject ap-
pears to be eminently fitted for such treatment.
1 The preposition " in " is used in the Catechism, but "by" occurs ia
True, they must be regarded only as instruments

and vehicles of Divine mercy but in so far as Divine
;
mercy is felt to be a vital thing, the channels by which

it is dispensed become of overwhelming interest; and
if they, as Officers of a corporate and divinely or-
dained Church, really have in any sense a monopoly
of the Holy Spirit, their unfolding of the Bible may
be the only explication religiously permissible.
It is who have no behef in the reality of
only those
priestly —
powers of this kind people to whom such
powers seem like superstition, who prefer to worry
out truth for themselves, and who pray directly to the
Fountain of Infinite Wisdom to keep them from
being deceived and to lead them into the way of truth
— it is only these who can afford to dispense with, or
in some cases even to resent, the good offices of the

Catholic Church, whether in its Greek or Roman or
Anglican branches.
If now we bethink ourselves what is it that con-
stitutes the essential difference of type, I think we
shall find that we must admit as the most distinctive
feature of the Prayer Book, from the denominational
and ultra-protestant point of view, not the ordinary
popular services of Matins and Evensong, nor the
still more beautiful form for Holy Communion, but
the regulation for the Ordering of Priests. The

greater part of that service may be passed as unde-
nominational, save that naturally it seems intended
expressly to sever the Anglican from the Roman
one form of the baptismal service: "Seeing now . . . Unit this child
is by baptism regenerate."
priesthood, but the official sentence which accompanies
the laying on of hands is distinctly and purposely
hierarchical. Those who accept that are Churchmen;

those who rejoice at it are high-Churclimen. All
other details sink into insignificance before this Epis-
copal pronouncement:
"Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of
a priest in the Church of God, now committed unto
thee by the Imposition of our hands. Whose sins
thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins
thou dost retain, they are retained."
This has been said ceremonially to every Anglican
parish priest in the British Isles, some of whom doubt-
less believe that a mysterious efficacy has descended
upon them, and that they possess the awful power
thus conferred.
That being so, it should be, and probably is, clear
to any contending and opposing party that priests
so consecrated, and animated by such beliefs, cannot
possibly consent to open their schools to dissenters:
it would be more reasonable for doctors to open the
hospitals to quacks. They are bound to insist on

their high prerogative, and to teach children to come
to them for the sacramental and other inspired influ-
ences which they can bestow on the penitent and the
faithful, or be false to their trust .^ And conversely,
1 "Experience has shown the inefficacy of the mere injunctions of
Church order, however scripturally enforced, in restraining from schism
the awakened and anxious sinner; who goes to a dissenting preacher
'hecause (as he expresses it) he gets good from him': and though he
does not stand excused in God's sight for yielding to the temptation,
surely the ministers of the Church are not blameless if, by keeping back
those who stoutly deny and conscientiously resent the

idea of any such special privileges —who quote op- in
position, for instance, 1 Cor. i. 17 —may bound
feel
to express their views also, and may earnestly seek to
prevent their children from coming under avowedly
sacerdotal influence.The text or texts in the Bible
on which an absolution dogma is based must be held
responsible for a good deal of the perennial conflict
between Church and Dissent. It may be possible for
Biblical critics to say that John xx. 21-23 is a later
insertion, like Matt. xvi. 19 and the end of Mark;
but assuming the most orthodox possible view, and
taking the record of the words about the forgiveness
and the retention of sins as exact, it is open even to
devout Bibliolators to argue against the modern use
of such a formula, somewhat as follows "By whom," :
they might ask, "were these words spoken to the dis-

ciples? Not by Jesus of Nazareth in the flesh, but
by the risen Lord just before His Ascension and Ses-
sion at the right hand of God. That which He could
say then, to those whom He was leaving comfortless
for the ten daj^s between His departure and the feast
of Pentecost, is now said by every bishop of the
Church. But it does not follow that what could be
said once, under exceptional circumstances, is suitable
the more gracious and consoling truths provided for the little ones of
Christ, they indirectly lead him into it. Had he been taught as n child,
tliat the Sacraments, not preaching, are the sources of Divine Grace;
that the Apostolical ministry had a virtue init which went out over the
whole Church, when sought by the prayer of faith; that fellowship with
it was a gift and privilege, as well as a duty, we could not have had
so many wanderers from our fold, nor so many cold hearts witliin it"
(Advt. to Tracts for the Times, 1834).
for indefinite repetition." Thus might opponents
contend, and their contention might have to be admit-
ted as true, and the modern use of the formula vir-
tually explained away, save by a few extremists who
still adhere to its literal interpretation.
Hence there is a well-marked cause of difference,
and justification of a mihtant attitude. How then
can it be hoped to effect formal reconciliation of the
two religious types? At first sight, only in one of two
ways either by general admission of truth in a sacer-
:
dotal of this kind; or, on the other hand, by the

equally improbable admission of the imaginary char-
any sort of basis for such a claim a percep-
acter of —
though it has survived the shocks of time,
tion that,
and come down the centuries to our own day, it is yet
a human imagination, and essentially false.
Taken in its literal and bald signification, the ordi-
nation sentence above quoted wôuld be intolerable to
a low or to a broad Churchman consequently he must
;
be able to interpret it otherwise. He would doubt-

less claim that it signifies the right to declare the judg-
ment of the Christian conscience, or at any rate of the
Christian Church, as to details of right and wrong:
to formulate, in fact, the judgments of the Holy
Spirit, under whose guidance he is henceforth to act.
Securus judical orbis terrarum. It is not, however,
a barren formula removed from practice: it enters
into the pastoral work of the priest, and is applied to
sick persons in the following form:
*'By his authority committed to me, I absolve thee
from all thy sins, In the name," etc.
Even this, however though challenged by John

Henry Newman, and regarded by him as inadmissi-
ble save under the Roman segis, is doubtless capable
of refined interpretation. And so it is with all the
—
formularies else it were impossible for great and
good men, to whom the natural sense of some of them
must be repugnant to hold office in the Church to-day.
Let it be admitted, once for all, that saving and min-
imising interpretations are known and utilised by
many of those inside the pale; and I shall assume,
without question now, that they are justified in these
interpretations under the circumstances. But those
outside the pale, and those who are hesitating to en-
ter it, are hable to take these f ormulse more nearly at
their face-value, and to mistrust ingenuity of inter-
pretation. —
Wherefore and that is my point such —
formulae act as obstacles, as weapons of exclusion, and
as causes of dissension and bitterness; even among
those who in all essentials agree. And they have
another function, perhaps equally harmful: they en-
courage extreme sacerdotal pretensions in a few ex-
ceptionally constituted persons, who, whatever may be
their saintly character, are in disaccord with the reli-
gious ideals of the nation. So much so, indeed, that
they might find their proper place in another and a
foreign communion.
Seeing, therefore, that such formulae may do harm,
it isopen to question whether they do a compensating
amount of good. Words, such as those above quoted,
either mean sometliing definite, or they do not. If
they confer any real power, if they give real strength
to the Church, they must be retained but
; if they serve
no useful purpose, if they signify only what is nat-
urally to be expected without them —namely, the
power of appreciating and fostering the good, of de-
tecting and condemning the bad, which is possessed
—
by every decent man if they are only a difficulty to
be boggled at and explained away, they constitute a
weakness, not a strength, and it may be well to have
them changed.
In any case it is quite absurd for either side in the
controversy —the ancient controversy between Catho-
lic and Protestant, between Priest and Presbyter, be-
tween High Anglican and Free Churchman, between

upholders of public ritual and insisters on private con-
science, between the objective and the subjective
types of worshippers, between those who lay stress on
the Brotherhood and those w^ho emphasise the indi-
—
vidual life it is futile for either side to pretend that
the other side is wicked and schismatic and ahenated
from God. So perhaps there is a third course ^what —
—
some think the fatal course of compromise in which
the permanent vitality of the two types of religious
humanity is recognised, and something of absolute
truth admitted to be visible from both points of view.
In which case it might not be too much to hope that
the two groups, no longer hostile, could ultimately
agree to live together in harmony, as two wings of an
enlarged National Church; without need for anyone
to abandon the phase of truth, or the form of worship
which especially appeals to his disposition and theo-
logical understanding. At present there are Non-
—
conformists, obedient to private judgment and dis-

obedient to authority, at both ends of the Church of
England: —those who left it when what they con-
sidered too much superstition was enforced; and those
who, without leaving it, feel conscientiously impelled
to ignore both lay jurisdiction and episcopal "admoni-
tion" when too little superstition is ordered; mean- —
ing by "superstition," in this connexion, the outcome
in practice of over-belief.
I do not venture to suggest inclusion in a National
Church of those who take a non-national view of their
civil obligations. No question of union or of adap-
tation can be entertained by those who regard a for-
eign Potentate and foreign Conclave as supreme au-
thoritj^ and fount of inspiration nothing short of sub-
:
mission and conversion would be acceptable to them.

Nor is it possible for them to join a merely national
Church, however nearly their creed may approach one
section of it on the purely religious side: a certain
—
canon which I presume is still in force to wit, that —
subjects of a temporal ruler disapproved by the
Church may be relieved of their allegiance, and that
the promulgation of unacceptable doctrine is to be
suppressed with a high hand —constitutes a sufficient
obstacle.^ It is far from desirable that any ecclesias-
1 The Lateran Council decree, above referred to, port of the Roman
Canon Law, is guarded against in the English Church by tlie oath of

the King's sovereignty administered to deacons, which runs as follows:
"I A. B. do swear, that I do from my heart abhor, detest, and abjure,
as impious and heretical, that damnable Doctrine and Position, That
Princes excommunicated or deprived by the Pope, or any Autliority of
tbc See of Rome. r»uy b« têpos^d oj* murderjpd hy tLteir SubitvU- •-
any otner wnaisoever. vVnd I do declare, tliat no foreign Prince, I'crsou,
tical gauntlet which investigators of truth may have
to run should in the smallest degree be backed up by
the power of the State. But no such difficulty arises
when contemplating a reincorporation of the Free
Churches which have grown up and divaricated in
consequence of a long spell of intolerant bigotry end-
ing in an act of disruption in and about the year 1662.
Many of them could easily rejoin one pole of a Na-
tional Church if it sought to attract them; at any rate
they need not be repelled by enforced uniformity in
detail, nor by any kind of secular legislation. The
Legislature conspicuously shrinks from interference
with Uberty of conscience and must recognise that
it made mistakes whenever it con-
in the past
sented to be coaxed or coerced into narrowness
and brutahty in matters of faith. It would surely
welcome a movement in favor of breadth and reinte-
gration, if it were mooted by those most concerned.
There is the more hope for some such solution, in-
asmuch as none but a bigot could claim to grasp in
Prelate, State, or Potentate, hath, or ought to have, any Jurisdiction,
Power, Superiority, Pre-eminence, or Authority, Ecclesiastical or Spir-
itual, within this Realm. So help me God."
This is the wording of the decree: "Let the secular powers, what-
ever offices they may exercise . . . exterminate from the territories
under marked out by the Church.
their jurisdiction heretics of all kinds
. . . But if being required and admonished by
any temporal ruler,
the Church, shall neglect to purge his land from this heretical filth,
let him be bound in the chain of excommunication by the metropolitan
and other bishops of the province. And if he shall disdain to make
satisfaction within a year, let this be signified to the Supreme Pontiff,
that he may from
declare the vassals of that ruler henceforth released
and may offer the land to occupation by Catholics, who,
their allegiance,
having exterminated the heretics, may possess it in peace and prcserro
it steadfast in the Faith."
his own person the whole truth concerning a subject

of infinite magnitude, or could suppose that the
precise form of worship most suited to himself must
necessarily be dominant throughout the cosmos.
Wherefore it might be recognised, by reasonable per-
sons on either side, that the manifest enthusiasm and
religious fervour of those from whom they differ are
roused, not by falsehood and error, but by real por-
tions, even though they be fragmentary portions, of
Divine truth which have hitherto escaped their own
ken, or for which their own emotional and aesthetic
nature happens to be unfitted.
The possibility of such a concordat may at first
sight seem remote, but it is worth more than momen-
tary consideration, and it is possible to detect more
reasonableness embedded in the proposal than appears
on the surface.
First of all, then, let us ask is it true that any

worshipper, however spiritually minded, can dispense
altogether with material facts as an aid to the ex-
pression and realisation of spiritual truth, and as an
external stimulus to the attitude of worship? Can
the spiritual and the material, in fact, be entirely and
utterly discriminated and separated? I will not ask
whether such separation is or not desirable; I will
is
not point out how much loss would be sustained if it

—
were practicable how fatal to half of nature such an
achievement would immediately be; but I will simply
ask, is it ever done, as a fact? I believe that a little
consideration will show that it is never really accom-
— ;

plished, and that some material agent is active even
in the most refined and spiritual perceptions. It will
at least be admitted that in the case of some religiously
minded persons the sights and sounds of nature
awaken a sense of Divine presence. In others the
same feelings are aroused by hearing of some human
action, or by meeting other human beings with whom
they are in sympathy. Some men are carried God-
ward by beauty, others by truth, others by goodness
and some even by the commonplace actions of daily
life. A remarkable face, casually encountered, or a
word even from a stranger, has been known occasion-
ally to call up thoughts akin to worship, even in the
most unritualistic follower of George Fox.
"Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self.
To rap and knock and enter in our soul."
If there be any truth in the suggestion and it is a —

question which must be answered by each for himself,
it can hardly be put in a form that will equally apply
—
to every individual ^then an essential feature of the
sacramental efficacy of material or external things,
when spiritually regarded and transfigured in the
light of a dominating faith, is admitted for material
:
means whereby the soul can be elevated, and brought

into conscious relation with Deity, are essentially of
the nature of sacraments.
*'To attempt to grasp the infinite by reason," says
Plotinus, "is futile; it can only be known in immedi-
ate presence. The faculty by which the mind divests

itself of its personality is Ecstasy. In ecstasy the soul
becomes loosed from its material prison, separated
from individual consciousness, and becomes absorbed
in the Infinite Intelligence from which it emanated."
This condition of inspiration, direct intuition, or en-
—
thusiasm, some approach to what is meant by "see-
—
ing God," is but transitory, and may be rare, but it
can be induced by a great variety of instrument. A
few attain it during the contemplation of law and
order enshrined in a mathematical expression, or in
some comprehensive philosophic formula but to many ;
the transfiguring and revealing experience is her-

alded by the song of birds, by sunshine upon grass,
by the wind by the wild solitude of
in tree-tops, or
mountains. To one the vision comes during the
music of an orchestra or the sight of a great work of
art to another, the atmosphere of an empty cathedral
;
is full of it; while to another, again, the same cathe-
dral must contain and incense in order effec-

lights
tively to act medium. To many the acts of
as a
common worship are an invaluable aid; while others
find their fullest help towards realising the Divine
presence in the consecrated materials of a purposely
arranged and specialty organised Sacrament.
The means of grace last mentioned being con- —
sciously directed to a desired end —
must be considered
as especially forcible and effective; at any rate for
those who are constituted in such a way as to appreci-
ate accessories and aids of this kind. But it is not to
be denied that, in spite of good intention, these eccle-
siastical forms and ceremonies strike another type of
religious disposition as so humanly ingenious and spe-
cifically organised as to repel rather than attract di-
vine thoughts; which with these people arise in more
spontaneous fashion, amid the simplicity of almost
unassisted worship in plain buildings, or among the
solitudes of unconsecrated nature.
It must be admitted however, —
and I presume that
Nonconformists would be the last to deny it, that —
there is always a danger lest, if himian effort and or-
ganisation be altogether discarded, as they sometimes
are by religiously minded secularists, the opportunities
for spontaneous excitation of religious thoughts may
seldom or never occur and so gradually the power of
;
entertaining lofty ideas may become atrophied by

lack of use. Moreover, those who depend entirely on
the capacities of their own unaided individual soul
may find, in times of stress, a sad emptiness and
dearth of comfort there. That is at once the weak-
ness and strength of an emphatically spiritual re-
ligion: it makes a severe demand on the worshippers'
own powers and faculties. This constitutes a weak-
ness, —
for there come times when the spirit is so
harassed by the troubles and trials of existence that
even the stoutest cannot stand the strain; but it con-
stitutes also a strength, —inasmuch as it braces and
exercises and develops the fibres of the character.
There will also he those who are impressed with, not
so much the right as the duty of private judgment;
and on the other hand there will always be those who
willingly submit to authority. In the same way we
:
must recognise a constitutional difference, a differ-

ence of temperament, a difference of response to di-
verse appeals. But the difference is only dependent
on "accident" or appropriateness of vehicle: it is not
a difference of really fundamental character; and
though it is natural to prefer one form of material
accessory to another, it is not human, at least it is not
religious, to despise and reject them all.
It perhaps not known to everybody that the

is
general nature of a sacrament is recognised by the

—
English Church very likely by the Roman Church
too, —
for it is definitely laid down in the "Homilies"
that in a certain sense there may be many sacraments
"Therefore neither it, nor any other sacrament else,
be such sacraments as Baptism and Cormnunion are;

but in a general acception the name of a sacrament
may be attributed to anything whereby an holy thing
is signified" {Homily on Common Prayer and Sac-
raments) .
Wherefore, opponents may ask, why not then carry

out this doctrine into practice? why urge the impor-
tance of two, or of seven?
One orthodox answer is that the two are "necessary
to salvation," —a doctrine corresponding with the
over-literalmisreading of a text, and not really be-
lieved any more than the corresponding "Athana-
sian" clauses are beheved. But a better answer, and
indeed the answer of Christendom generally with few
exceptions, is that the two were in a special sense
authorised and enjoined by Christ; so in order to es-
timate their crucial character it is instructive to con-
sider how these specially Christian sacraments arose.
It is easy to add an element of mysticism to the bare
facts,and those who make this addition may claim it
as a sign of spiritualgrowth but the addition should
;
be voluntarj^ it cannot wisely be imposed by legisla-

tion. The bare facts themselves may be legitimately
and inoffensively regarded somewhat thus:
Jesus found the old baptismal act of ceremonial
washing revived and used as a sign of repentance by
his great precursor, —
either as a symbohc cleansing,
or else as a symbohc burying to sin and new birth to
righteousness (for both significations can be attached
to the rite of immersion) he recognised
; instinctively
the advantage of associating divine thoughts with so
common an act as bathing or washing, and, just as he
utilised any common event for doctrinal purposes, so
he utilised this act, by submitting himself to it there- :
by canonising it among Christians for all time. But

then he did the same thing virtually with the sower
and the seed, with a marriage feast, with fisherman's
and a multitude of com-
nets, with carpenters' tools,
mon incidents of life; though in these the Church,
perhaps fortunately, has been slower to follow him to
the full extent. I say fortunately, because it is so apt
to let its enthusiasm carry unwisely far in the case

it :
of baptism it has at certain periods of its history, at

any rate some of its branches, gone too far, and
in
converted a ceremony of admission into a miraculous
riteof saving efficacy.
In another case also it has not only followed, but
has emphatically gone beyond and exceeded, its in-
what many think a lamentable extent at

structions, to ;
times even daring to inflict torture and death on those

who could not travel v/ith it along this humanly ex-
tended road. For the common act of eating and
drinking was among those conspicuously sanctified by
Christ; on that pathetic occasion when, after long
discourse on his approaching fate, and much figura-
tive speech concerning the necessity for complete
union with himself, he took up the bread and the wine,
no doubt blessing them after the still extant Jewish
fashion, and then — perhaps half thinking of ancient
pagan rites, wherein exuberant gentile wôrshippers
had spoken of eating the flesh of a god, and certainly
remembering the sacrifices of flesh and blood f amihar
in their own scriptures and in the forthcoming pass-
over—added, in a moment of enthusiasm fraught with
strange destiny for the future Church, "This is my
flesh and this is my blood. Bless it, and take it, and
remember me whenever henceforth ye feed together."
As for himself, this was his last food and his last
—
drink a long spasm of torture and hunger and thirst
—
was all that lay before him on earth "I shall taste
no more of the fruit of the vine till I drink it new with
you in the Kingdom of my Father."
Regarded simply and naturally, it is a gracious
domestic ceremony akin to the toast of good fellow-
;
ship, but with the sadness of pain and parting com-

mingled. It was surely intended as an act of union
and brotherhood, not as a testing instrument or divid-
ing engine. The sharing of one loaf is recognised
by St. Paul (1 Cor. x. 17) as a symbol of the oneness
of the many in the Christian body a true com- —
munion.
Looked at from the point of view of subsequent
history, and what human organisation has made of it,
even devout worshippers must admit that superstition
has been prone to enter, and that its ecclesiastical de-
velopments have been at times painful beyond de-
scription.
Yet that should not prevent those who prefer not
to partake of ecclesiastically administered sacrament
from recognising that to others it constitutes the very
bread of life, and that to worshippers of this character
the meaning and efficacy of the symbols are en-
hanced beyond measure by ceremonial observance
and ritual.
What has been said about sacraments can be in-

terpreted as applying to priesthood also. A priest is
a vehicle of the Holy Ghost, an interpreter of divine

things, and a helper towards higher life. Priesthood
is a reality but, if
; my interpretation of it be correct,
it cannot be a professional monopoly. Like genius,
it evades definition; but is it not likely to be coercible
and transmissible by ceremonial means. Surely it
must be true that the Spirit moveth where it listeth,
and is not amenable to clerical control.
Every man, woman, or child who has the power of
elevating the thought of another human being, every-
one who is chosen to act as a channel of the Divine
Spirit, is for the time a priest. may
be well to set
It
aside and train and guard a band of persons who feel
specially called to this high office ; in the hope that by

discipline and custom their powers of true priesthood
and sainthood may increase. It is desirable that the
Church should set store by and guard its priests, just
as it guards its sacraments, from pollution and con-
tamination with the things of the outer world. Pre-
cautionary and reverential arrangements are humanly
intelligible and more or less necessary, but they are
not essential they are matters of ecclesiastical polity,
;
not of divine ordinance.

The Church recognises, indeed, that every man is in
some small sense a priest in his own household, and
admits that in times of emergency he may act as such,
up to the point of administering the minor sacrament
of Baptism, provided he employs the right material
and the authorised form of words; but, save for this
charitable exception, it jealously guards its own
rites and privileges, and denies the real apostolic
authority to all save those whom it has itself
ordained: thereby and to that extent appearing to
claim a monopoly of the Holy Spirit, which, in the
judgment of many, it cannot rigorously sustain, ex-
cept in so far as it may be justified by public conven-
ience and usage.
So long as specific and special priesthood is recog-
nised as possessed only in a representative capacity, it
can do no harm. Harm begins when an exclusive

character is claimed for it. The true official priest is
representative or typical of the potential priesthood

of all symbol of the close con-
religious humanity, a
nection and affectionate intercourse between God and
—

man: somewhat as Clirist was essentially the son of
man and son of God, to the exclusion of none of his
brethren.
In this form the office is not to be stigmatised as
sacerdotal — it is only to be so stigmatised when it
claims to be exclusive, when it seeks to be a monopoly
of the grace of God.
So also the Eucharist may legitimately be held to
represent or typify a Divine Presence, provided it is
likewise taught that all nature is the living garment of
God, and that space and time are expressions of His
thoughts. It is not a claim for the Divine presence,
but a claim for the Divine absence anywhere that — —
should be resisted.
There is no need for nonconformist feeling in these
matters, except in details of administration which may
well be made more elastic. Priesthood and sacra-
ments are realities; forms and orderly ceremonies are
necessary for collective human worship it is their ex- :
aggeration and misunderstanding that is to be depre-

cated, not the things themselves. Those w^ho think
they are worshipping in spirit only, are really using
forms and material aids, though the forms may be of
a simple character. An attitude of body, an enforced
silence, a gathering together into an accustomed build-
ing, the reading of a book, the singing of a hymn
all these are physical and material aids to spiritual
growth, and are therefore essentially sacramental.
It is but a question of degree; and those who cannot
utihse forms of so simple a character are justified in
seeking to invent and enjoy ceremonies of a more

elaborate kind.
So also, everyone privileged to act as a minister
of God, a true vehicle of the Holy Spirit, is for the
time being a priest by right divine. It is only because
under present conditions such influence is compara-
tively rare, that we have to betake ourselves to a pro-
fessional priesthood. It is a necessity: it is not an
ideal. The ideal held out by Christ himself was a
high one. "Be ye perfect," he said. Be a Christ,
he might have said: be thyself a messenger and re-
vealer of divine truth, up to the measure of thy ca-
pacity. "Receive ye the Holy Spirit." He did not
say these things to the priest and orthodox worship-
—
pers of his own day to them he said quite other
things : —
^these high injunctions he laid upon a body of
trained and chosen peasants who had loved and fol-

lowed him, and thus ordained them with genuine
priesthood.
And to all the animate and inanimate creatures, of
earth and air and sea, he gave a message too. On
all of them he conferred sacramental efficacy noth- —
ing is —
unholy or unclean everything can join in the
song of joy and worship that rises from all healthy
nature. By his teaching the whole world of matter
is transfigured and glorified before our eyes it is suf- ;
fused with immanent Deity, and has become, for

those with eyes to see, a mirror of the Ahnighty.
Now all this, which to most of us is so clear now,

was not equally clear to the generality of folk in the
times gone by. Saints here and there seized the truth,
no doubt, and tried to express it in language fitted to
their time; but from the great mass of the people it
was hidden. Persons in high office Archbishop —
—
Cranmer and others put together our liturgy,
during a moderately exalted period of English his-
tory, utilising many beautiful petitions and formu-
laries, and showing great genius for the work; but it
is not to be supposed that they were gifted with infal-
libility, so that they grasped the truth completely and
expressed it for all time. Nor was the Act of Parlia-

ment which crystallised and congealed the Prayer
Book an inspired document.^ Admitting that his-
toric forms make a special appeal to the emotions,
revision of the Prayer Book on the intellectual
side ought to be and is necessary, especially after a
century of great intellectual achievement. The ques-
tion arises whether the time is not ripe for revision
now.
Loth as I am to meddle with professional and ec-
clesiastical matters, the present juncture in the history
of the EngHsh Church and nation seems to me suffi-
ciently important to compel those who recognise the
pressing need for social reform, and the great power
and influence for good which a truly efficient Church
would possess, to urge a reconsideration of the im-
plicit tests and requirements imposed on candidates
1 Even Newman, in a tract urging no concession or tittle of alter-

ation, says: "I confess that there are few parts of the Service that I
could not disturb myself about and feel fastidious at, if I allowed my
mind in this abuse of reason."
for Holy Orders in the Church of England at various

stages in their career. — The fact that it is a National
Church removes the charge of impertinence from the
utterance of a layman on such matters. The
of spirit
the following sentences, taken from "His Majesty's
Declaration" printed in every Anglican Prayer
Book, is not attractive to an age which has imbibed
the idea of evolution and some conception of the faith-
ful investigation of truth:
. . "the settled Continuance of the Doctrine and
.
Disciple of the Church of England now estabhshed;

from which We will not endure any varying or de-
parting in the least Degree. . . . We
will, that all
further curious search be laid aside. . . . And that

no man hereafter shall either print, or preach, to
draw the Article aside any way, but shall submit to it
in the plain and full meaning thereof: and shall not
put his own sense or comment to be the meaning
of the Article, but shall take it in the literal and
grammatical sense.
"That if any publick Reader in either of Our Uni-
versities, or any Head or Master of a College, or any
other person respectively in either of them, shall affix
any new sense to any Article, or shall publickly read,
determine, or hold any publick Disputation, or suf-
fer any such to be held either way, in either the Uni-
versities or Colleges respectively; or if any Divine
in the Universities shall preach or print any thing
either way, other than is already establislied in Con-
vocation witli Our Royal Assent; he, or they, the Of-
fenders, shall be liable to Our displeasure, and the
Church's censure in our Commission Ecclesiastical,
any other: And We will see there shall be
as well as
due Execution upon them."
If the Church excludes, and to some extent even
if it only threatens to exclude, from its ministry all
young men who are unable to accept a system of

archaic formula as valid, with whatever saving
clauses and subterfuges it dilutes in practice its
theoretical requirements, it may be creating for itself
an "unnatural selection," so to speak, a survival or
selection of the weakest. And if it does so, then, like
any other organism in the same case, it must in the
long run infallibly degenerate.
I believe that its leaders, its real leaders, admit that
it could with advantage amend its procedure in sev-
eral particulars; especially that it could diminish the
amount of mechanical uniformity and allow some
elasticity in the use of a liturgy which, though fra-
grant with historical aroma, has now become to many
people monotonous and barren. But the chief wish
of those who love the idea of a National Church is
that it would so modify its entrance barriers, and so

simplify its formularies, as to draw to itself more
young men of character, intellect, and breadth of
view.
Only so can it once more become, what it ought to
be and is not, a truly comprehensive National Church,
— one flock under one Shepherd, elevating and —
sanctifying the State by connexion with it; instead of,
what many now consider it, an unholy alliance of
mingled constraint and privilege, hampered in its —
own actions by the rigidity of its connexion with

Parliament, and yet drawing thence so much worldly
dignity and social independence as to be regarded
with suspicion by an able and energetic portion of a
religiously minded nation, whose ministers are ex-
cluded from co-operation in the National ceremonies
and from official recognition by the State, and who
consequently conduct their ministrations at a percep-
tible disadvantage a disadvantage which to Newman
:
seemed so serious that he wrote, in 1833: "We know

how miserable is the condition of rehgious bodies not
supported by the State."
The difficulties surrounding reform are consider-
able, though it is possible to exaggerate them; but
sooner or later it will be undertaken; and the exclu-
siveness of State connexion will be broken down,
either by the method of disestablishment, or by that
of greater comprehensiveness and union. Would
that a movement might be made towards union Not !
union in every minor doctrine, nor in every detail of

practice, but unison of effort, coupled with clear prac-
tical perception of the real needs of the time. To this
end artificial boundaries must be broken down, and
the domain covered by the National Church must be
broadened till it includes all aspiring workers who
are casting out devils in the one Name.
— ;
CHAPTER VI
A REFORMED CHURCH AS AN ENGINE OF PROGRESS

"Religion was once the pillar of which went before the human
fire
race in its great march through history, showing
it the way. Now it is
fast assuming the role of the ambulance which follows in the rear and
picks up the exhausted and wounded. This, too, is a great work, but it
is not suf5cient. And when religion has disburdened herself of all her
dead values, she will once more, in intimate association with ethics, rise
to be a power which leads men forward." Hoffding.
the preceding chapter I have urged that the re-

INcreation and continuance of a truly National
Church must involve a great simplification of Church
enactments, so as to leave fair freedom of interpreta-
tion concerning themeaning of Christian ceremonies
and that the way to reform lies through a movement
of breadth and incorporation, which should consoli-
date the now prevalent desire for greater tolerance
and union.
In the belief that the subject is of great import-
ance, and that the time is nearly ripe for reform, I
now wish to proceed further in the same direction,
and to urge that, putting less trust in oaths and form-
ularies, we should cease from attempting to bind by
anticipation revolting and unwilling spirits, and show
—
more faith in living humanity especially in the kind
of humanity which feels called to work in the Chris-
112
CHURCH AS AN ENGINE OF PROGRESS 113
tian vineyard. There need be no forced alteration

of procedure in religious services, but there should
be large avoidance of compulsory uniformity. We
must admit the existence of worshippers of different
types, we must realise the need for growth and de-
velopment, and must encourage loyalty to the spirit
—
of truth especially among those who co-operate in
good works; in the assurance that, by those who do
the works, all essential doctrine will be sufficiently ac-
cepted, without compulsion, in due time.
It may seem inappropriate, and in strict sense im-
pertinent, for a student of science to feel strongly on
such topics, but it is an inappropriateness not without
precedent. The general welfare of humanity, and
the stability of advancing civilisation, are themes of
interest to all, whatever our special studies may be;
and before now a prophet of Art has felt constrained
to urge that artistic development must be stunted, and
the highest art impossible, until social conditions are
improved. So some writers and speakers, with
also
the ear of the populace, condemn a peaceful absorp-
tion in scientific pursuits, amid the surrounding mass
of poverty and misery, as a mark of selfishness and
hard-heartedness. What is the good of abstruse
scientific theories, they say, when what people need is
wholesome food and warmth and decent homes And !
the thoughts of many a would-be student are per-

turbed in the same way. These good and sympathetic
people vicariously feel the pressure of life so keenly
that no occupation save relieving the pain seems worth
while. Their lives and sympathies are so absorbed
and exhausted in the tormenting problems of a great
city, under present conditions, that they grow to re-
gard the multifarious interests of the world through
the perspective of the victim on the rack, to whom
but one thing is needful.
But I lay no particular stress on a likelihood of
injury to knowledge, through prevalent lack of sym-
pathy with pure science and ignorance of its intrinsic
value, nor on any other merely intellectual obstacle;
that is not the sort of thing which paralyses activity
and acts as a constant sore. If society were in a
healthy condition, if the development and elevation of
man had not to take a secondary and quite subordi-
nate place to the development and accumulation of
property, a few generations of better education could
easily mend it on the intellectual side; but it is the
greedy and essentially uncivilised condition of what
prides itself as the most practical part of society, and
the consequent deep-rooted and unadmitted canker
eating into the bones of the social organism, that is
disquieting and oppressive.
It is against that a National Church is or
all this
should be fighting. If these evils are to be uprooted,

I cannot see how the uprooting can be done by a
single reformer or prophet —
a Carlyle, a Ruskin, or
—
a Morris here and there; they must be attacked by
an organised army of workers and thinkers, imbued
with the right spirit, informed as to the real facts,
devoted to the cause of goodness, and trained for the
detection of long-accustomed errors and for the de-
velopment of human life.
An efficient contingent of such an army exists, or

should exist, in the churches of every denomination.
Here are men picked out, we must suppose, for their
keen perception of right and wrong, for their en-
—
thusiasm and longing after higher life, men who are
subjected to special training for the work, and then
sent as missionaries throughout the whole range of
society, to preach Christ's Gospel and to bring the
Kingdom of Heaven into realisation upon earth.
Here should be a general staff of commanding
power, if only it be in real touch with the people, if
only it realises the extent and the quality of its mis-
sion, and is properly prepared to cope with it. But it
must concentrate its weapons upon the enemy, and
must not employ them in internecine warfare. An
army whose officers dispute among themselves, whose
horse and foot are in conflict, and whose artillery is
trained upon its engineers, is not an efficient instru-
ment of conquest.
Those who realise to some extent what a power for
good a truly National Church might be, and how with
comparative ease the earnest religious spirit of Eng-
land could absorb and utilise the energies of such a
Church —a truly Christian and truly compreliensive
Church, with the best men attracted, not repelled, the
present narrow mechanical uniformity superseded by
breadth and liberalitj^ with errors of past history dis-
carded,mean jealousies extinguished, and differences
—
composed such persons may feel that the reform
and strengthening of the Church is ]K'rhn])s the best
though not the most direct route towards elimination
—

of the wrongs and amelioration of the of our
evils
social state. At present many of the thinking work-

ers are alienated from what they imagine is religion;
and a cry for general secularisation is gaining ground.
The State may be rightly urged to have nothing to do
with controversial religion but the elimination of re-
;
and the elimination of religion are not

ligious disputes
necessarily thesame thing. The cessation of all re-
cognition of religion itself by the State is certainly
not a step in the right direction.
The cry for disestablishment is not loud just now;
but it is liable to be raised at any time, so long as the
present condition of special privilege continues. The
cry is really a cry for more equality of treatment
for more national recognition all round. Only a few
want to separate all religion from the State; though
many might rejoice at freedom from so-called Eras-
tian control. A section of Presbyterians north of the
Tweed may feel conscientiously opposed to State-
connexion of any kind, and some Nonconformists
may imagine that they feel conscientious objection;
but that is not the real bugbear in England; it is the
limitation and narrowness of the connexion that is
really objected to. Broaden the Church out till it is
truly national, by removing the preposterous coercion
in detail which is now nominally exercised, —
and the
grievance disappears. The National Church could
then absorb the best activities of all denominations,
and the nation would be strengthened on its highest
side to an incalculable extent. Efforts at betterment
of human conditions are precarious and difficult and
rather blind, so long as mutual hostility or suspicion

persists among the branches of the Christian Church.
Either corporate action towards amehoration is im-
possible, or the Church, in the most comprehensive
sense, should be the most powerful army for good in
existence. Its ministers are like officers distributed
throughout the country, with social prestige and the
attentive ear of a large proportion of the more
leisured and opulent classes; these Officers should be
engaged, even more than at present, in training and
enlarging and disciplining the forces of progress,
ready for a re-birth of society.
Herein lies, I believe, the most vital reform of all;
but it is not a reform that can be procured by direct
aim; it must arrive spontaneously after attraction of
the best and ablest men to the ministry. The nation
should demand the Ministry of its best men — in the
Church as well as in the Cabinet.
And the reform contemplated should be real and
genuine; the Confession of sin repeated in ecclesias-
tical buildings should be no conventional and mean-
ingless chant, nor should it be supposed to apply only
to individual and personal sinfulness; it should above
all, in collective worship, apply to collective sin, — to
that sinfulness of society which Christ would de-
nounce if he came again among us. The vigour of
that denunciation would, I expect, eclipse any tiling
now heard from pulpits; though it would, I believe,
take a different and unexpected direction, and con-
cern itself less witli the weaknesses and follies and
half-repented sins of humanity, than with the greed.
the selfishness, the sheer indi^dduahsm and mammon-
worship which excite but occasional reprobation; it
would attack the and contented acquiescence

heartless
in conditions wliich debase the soul of a people and
erect the extravagant luxury of a few on the grind-
ing poverty of many.
In that sense an acknowledgment of fault is in-
deed urgently and constantly needed but the f eehng
;
should be driven home and made real; confession

should never be allowed to degenerate into an easy
perfunctory form. The selfislmess of society is the
really burning sin of our time, and it is the more dan-
gerous because so generally unrecognised. It has
been unrecognised in the chancel as well as in the
—
nave it seems never to have been adequately recog-
nised by an Estabhshed Church as a whole and to —
this one cause such a Church is thought to owe much
of its impotence to this is due much of the mistrust
;
of the Church by the people, who have found it in the

past often against themselves, and siding with the
rich and powerful; —
an attitude singularly different
from that of its Master. That inspired song the
^'Magnificat" struck the keynote of primitive Chris-
tianity.
Let us freely and heartily admit that a great in-
ternal effort is now being made to revive the early
spirit in the Church —the spiritof brotherhood and
social work. And yet there is room. The enthusiasm
and exertion of some Anghcan leaders are beyond
praise, but their spirit has not yet permeated the
whole mass. Wherever the right spirit exists the
people respond to it, as they did in a.d. 30. Christ's

teachings frequently dealt with the subject of riches,
even then, when vast accumulations were hardly feasi-
ble, save in a form accessible to the ravages of moth
and rust; but with the invention of stocks and shares
the possibilities of property have enlarged, and his
denunciations now might be unexpectedly welcomed
by some who do not profess and call themselves Chris-
tians. —
There are men men of influence among the
artisans—who openly scoff at what they call religion,
who nevertheless plead "not guilty" for the down-
trodden victims of pernicious surroundings; who em-
phasise the fact that we are our brothers' keepers;
who really long for a fairer and wholesomer setting
for the life of human beings, and who have been re-
pelled from Christianity, not by the teachings of
Christ himself, but by the confusions and errors of his
nominal disciples. These men call out for the clergy
to be "converted to Christianity." What do they
mean? It were perhaps well for ministers of all de-
nominations to consider what they mean.
Doubtless in so speaking they are to some extent
making the mistake illustrated by the above-quoted
objection to unharassed scientific work. For just as
strenuous intellectual concentration needs eyes tem-
porarily shut to the mass of avoidable misery and
—
pain pain caused by human stu])idlty and by almost
inhuman selfishness, to which everyone must shut his
—
eyes at times, or life were impossible so tlie ck^rgy
must at times possess tlieir souls in peace and com-
fort; they have to minister to believers and sinners
and saints, as well as to contend against hypocrites
and pharisees and servants of Mammon. The Church
cannot only struggle and fight, it must sometimes
stretch outits hands towards the farther shore, un-
hindered by differences and controversies, and un-

burdened by the sense of social misery and
degradation. Not all services need be mission serv-
ices ; every now and then saints may allow their souls
toexpand in mystic worship of the Supreme, and may
aim at devout contemplation and ecstacy; on certain
days their "Divine Service" may be limited to the
and esoteric kind which now all but
ecclesiastical
monopolises that splendid name.
But that must not be the chief employment of their
lives; not while present evils continue. The Church
must be militant if it is to become triumphant; it
must learn strategy, and must throw its forces in the
right direction. Right belief is intensely important,
but is slow of attainment, and for the present right
action is more prominently called for. It is no time
for vegetating and leaf -development it is fruits that
:
will be looked for. There must be far less of "Who-

soever will be saved must thus think'' and far more
of "Whosoever will save others must thus do'' God's
in His heaven truly, but all is not right with the
world. Books written to-day immerse us, and rightly
immerse us, in a welter of poverty and misery. The
bitter cry of the victims of competition, of the out-
casts of civilisation, and of the children w^ho are born
to sin and wretchedness, when they are not born to
death, —
the cry of multitudes with hardly any chance
:
of decent happiness and no outlook upon the beauty

—
of this world, this cry must be ringing in the ears of
God till He cannot hear the chants of the churches,
however musically they may be intoned, however fre-
quently they may be repeated, and however completely
the Ornaments-rubic may be obeyed. The spirit of
greed is abroad; its net has gathered human beings
together in heaps, has removed them from the fields
and hedgerows, and has forced them into crowded
dens. With success this spirit is doing devil'swork;
itand its ally, smug self-satisfied stupidity, are the
modern fiends; these are the Satans with which the
Church should be fighting.
What we have to learn is that the will of God is to
be done on earth; that the Kingdom of Heaven is to
be a present kingdom, here and now, not relegated
always to the future. Eternity is not something in
the future, any more than it is something in the past
it extends into the future and it extends into the past
— —
without limit both ways, but this is eternity, tliis
moment we are alive, and the message of Christ re-
lates to ''is/' not to ''will be/' The present is the only
opportunity for a deed. We
are to realise the liigh-
est here. If not here in this condition, why anywhere
in any condition? For wherever we are will always
be *'here," and the time will always be "now." As
soon as God's will is done on earth as it is done in
heaven, a great part of the distinction between the two
states of existence is abolislied. That diminution of
distinction is wliat tlie terrestrial Churcli lias to strive
to accomplish; that is the ultimate object of its in-

spiration and its labour: the ideal is to be made real,
the world is to be transfigured and transformed. The
task of the priest is the reconciliation, in our conscious-
ness, of self, the world, and God.
It with a knowledge of a mass of feeling and
is
effort, some of it at present soured and hostile to-

wards what used to hear preached from pulpits of
it
nearly every kind, but genuine in its aims and its love
—
for humanity, that using the word "Church" in the
broadest sense, as the combined and corporate society
—
of good men in action, ^men whose lives and energies
are devoted to the highest aims, in the spirit of real
and effective and universal Christianity I urge that —
if the nation is to be regenerated, it must be regener-
ated through the agency of The Church. There must
be a union of effort among all who are casting out
devils in the one Name.
But how great a change is needed! Contrasting
the work that is to be done with the means adopted in
too many cases for avoiding the doing of it, a prophet
would be justified in exclaiming to the churches, and
to the Church of this country, "Awake thou that
sleepest and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give
theehfe!"
Divine Service
The popular notion of Divine Service makes it con-
sistof a multiplicity of so-called "services," which are
too often no service at all, but recreation or sensuous
enjojonent to those engaged in them; a kind of —
service perhaps as unacceptable to the Deity, under
:
existing circumstances, as those other rehgious cere-

monies inveighed against by the first Isaiah, in a pe-
riod of less opportunity and responsibihty than the
present, when, as now, it could be said of a large part
of society, "every one loveth gifts and followeth after
rewards .
." and the cry of the oppressed is not
.
heard even at the temple altars

"To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices . . . who
hath required this at your hands. . Bring no more vain oblations;
. .
incense is an abomination unto me. . Your new moons and your

. .
appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am

weary to bear them. . . When ye make many prayers I will not
.
hear. Your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; put
away the evil doings from before mine eyes cease to do evil, learn to
;
do well; seek justice, set right the oppressor, relieve the oppressed."
The Church was not founded by temple services,

nor will it grow in that way. An exceptional Forty
Daj^s, for the strengthening of the soul, and invigor-
ation or insurance of its dominion over the body, must
be wholesome and right and other times of seclusion,
;
as means to ends, are more than justified; but it is as

means to an end that they should be regarded, and —
the end is nothing less than the reform of social
abuses, and the rescue of humanity from the damning
conditions of hopeless and degrading squalor.
The kind of society which allows its children to be
befouled and degraded and brought up in an atmos-
phere of crime, is the kind of society that sliould be
dealt with by the aid of a millstone and a rope. If it
uses its fresh human material as manure, it may tknir-
ish in a rank way, it may shoot uj) a coarse and luxur-
iant growth, it may yield a crop of millionaires; but
some kinds of fruit are too expensive for rational
cultivation,some are not altogether wholesome there :
are trees which must be hewn down and cast into the
fire.
Religious bodies may pride themselves on the

soundness and orthodoxy of their beliefs; but "he
that doeth righteousness is righteous"; and supposed
good beliefs are no compensation for bad results,
either in society or in an individual. To speak
results are inconsistent with healthy be-
liefs
—"dosuchwell
strictly,
will follow thought" if the thought be
of the right kind and there is high authority for the
;
uselessness of merely crying Lord, Lord It is deeds !
far more than creeds that are wanted now; or rather,

it is creeds interpreted and acted out in deeds. We
have to discoverj but we have also to realise. We do
not want matter without form, any more than we want
form without matter. An idea must be incarnated
before it is That is how Christianity was
effective.
founded, when the Logos was made flesh,
"And so the Word had breath and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds
More strong than all poetic thought."
Nothing less than a re-incarnation of the Logos

will reinvigorate the faith of Christendom and carry
forward the salvation of mankind. That is themean-
ing of the Second Advent. It is in our power to
make ready the what our enlightenment
way; that is
and education and privileges are for. Man, though

a little lower than the angels, is a messenger and serv-
ant of God just as truly, and his high mission is mani-

fest. We as a nation have gone abeady into the ends
of the earth; let us see to it that we understand and
carry out rightly our great commission, in no narrow
and remembering that, unless we
iconoclastic spirit;
set things right at home, our teaching will be ineffec-
tive, and sarcasm will be the emotion excited by our
example. The second incarnation will be in the hearts

of all men —a reign of brotherhood and love for which
the heralds are already preparing their songs. Al-
ready there are "signs of his coming and sounds of
his feet"; and upon our terrestrial activity the date of
this Advent depends.
:
CHAPTER VII
SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS REFORM
I were challenged to say wherein I think that an

IFimprovement might be made in the regulations
and arrangements for a National Christian Church
under present conditions, I should emphasise three
things
First, more spontaneity and less monotony in
Church of all kinds, and the abandonment of
service
mechanical uniformity in worship.
Second, more liberal education for Ministers; and
the broadening and simplification of tests, so as to ex-
elude as few good men as possible.
Third, and consequent upon these two, clear-
sighted recognition of the signs of the times, study
and enlightened encouragement of true beneficence,
and stalwart opposition to all abuses of power.
I hesitate to enter into detail concerning these
things, and yet I feel impelled to make the attempt;
so, if I proceed, I will do so straightforwardly and
without expressed apology.
Rubrics
First, concerning regulations for the services of the
Church. Here I plead not for legislation, but for the
126
SUGGESTIONS TOWARD REFORM 127
absence of legislation —for the removal of the close

and which exists now.
definite legislation
Permissively the Prayer Book can remain un-
changed, with merely a substitution of *'may" for
"shall," and with the occasional iteration of words
stating that for many centuries such and such was the
practice of the Church, —thereby indicating a respect
for historic continuity ; but all sentences laying down
a prescribed procedure, not as advisable only, but as
compulsory — so that any the least variation from it
becomes an illegality to be proceeded against in law

courts — should surely be cancelled.
Within the Church itself some rules can be laid
down, as from time to time may be thought wise by
the several branches, but they will not be burdensome
upon the conscience. In the Episcopal branch the
Bishops will naturally have paternal authority, which
doubtless they will exercise with moderation and wis-
dom; in the Presbyterian branch the Presbytery will
have appropriate authority; in the Congregational
branch, it is to be presumed, the Council; and so on.
Details of practice and use of formularies would thus
be decided on by eligible and sometimes competent
bodies, who can readily modify them from time to
time, and can leave what elasticity they think wise;
and Parliament would be relieved of a burdensome
and archaic responsibility.
The Prayer Book, considered as a legal document,
was drawn upon the assumption that any freedom or
elasticity or spontaneity in conducting a service was
—
sure to be misused not through malice and wicked-
ness, but through ignorance and stupidity. It is, in
fact, founded on mistrust of intellectual or spiritual
—
competence, mistrust which tends to justify itself
by reaction of the mechanical system itself upon
those constantly subjected to its constricting influ-
ence. It is also based on the idea that rehgious feel-
ing is a proper subject for legislation, and that it is
possible to coerce men's behefs, to govern their in-

clinations and control their consciences, by a system of
rigid rubies and regulations; whereas it is notorious,
and almost proverbial, that if the will to break law is
active, the most carefully drafted clauses have ex-
tremely little binding force. For their interpretation
depends in no sort on the intention of those who
framed or of those who authorised them; their inter-
pretation can be garbled to suit an emergency, or can
be adapted to a changed system of opinions.
For instance, the Thirty-Nine Articles, agreed
upon by Convocation in 1562 "for the avoiding of
diversities of opinions," were for the most part drawn
up by Protestants as a bulwark against the Church
—
of Rome a defence against any approach to the doc-
trines of that Church in certain well-known and fa-
—
mous controversies: such as. Scripture not the Rule
of faith; Faith not the sole Instrument of Justifica-
tion; Infallibility of General Councils; Purgatory,
Pardons, Relics, Invocation of Saints five additional
;
Sacraments; Transubstantiation the sacrifices of the

;
Mass. But Cardinal Newman, while still a minister

of the Church of England, was able to show, in his
famous Tract 90, that the wording of the Articles,

when taken in conjunction with the simiharly Prot-
estant "Homilies," did not, as a matter of fact, ex-
clude the interpretation regarded as baneful by those
who formulated them; in fact, that the Articles lent
themselves to Roman interpretation. They did not
indeed suggest such an interpretation on their sur-
face, but they were patient of it. He argued this
with extreme ingenuity, and some special pleading,
but, as I think, with a good deal of success. Cer-
tainly he has had followers who have largely availed
themselves of an unexpected and welcome elasticity
in the direction of Romanism, thus unexpectedly dis-
covered in, or extracted out of, or perhaps foisted
into what was intended to be a rigidly Protestant
document and scheme of Protestant theology.
And so it will always be with a living and growing
—
Church, or any other organism quite irrespective of
the rights and wTongs of any particular controversy
or School of thought. If the thought or School
exist, if living and earnest people feel that truth and
progress lie in a particular direction, then, however
ultimately mistaken they turn out to be, no system of
formularies can bind them; they will not hand over
their conscience and their judgment to the custody of
a past. They can be loyal to a living and present
spirit in the Church to-day, but not to dead formula-
ries. These they will either ignore, or will take in a
non-natural sense, or will twist till they mean the op-
posite of what they were intended to mean. A form
;
ISO CORPORATE WORSHIP AND SERVICE

of words is usually capable of interpretation in ac-
cordance with a living will; and if not, it can be
either ignored or altered.
History is familiar enough with obsolete and re-
pealed Statutes why should the Statutes which regu-
:
late so vital a thing as the professed National

Religion alone be free from reconsideration and
amendment? If non-alteration be regarded as neces-
sitated by some theory, —that theory is a superstition
the only justification for rigid adherence to fixed
forms is the practical danger of licence and unset-
tling of faith that might result from freedom. That
is a point of policy on which it is possible for reason-
able people to take opposite sides, at any particular

juncture or crisis; but it will be generally admitted
that a faith dependent on blinkers and fetters for its
maintenance is not likely in a progressive age to last
many generations. Anchorage to a submerged rock
is not safe amid rising waters.
Suggestions Concerning the Liturgy

The Liturgy itself must be dealt with by experts,
and it is barely proper for me to make suggestions;
but having gone so far I will hesitate no more, but
will proceed in brief and dogmatic fashion to say
what I feel constrained to say. For it is an admitted
fact that the Church of England is less in touch with
the people than it used to be, and this is not likely to
be wholly and solely the fault of the people. Indeed
it may be due to unwisdom rather than to fault of
any kind.
:;•
At present both the Daily Services are supposed

to open with the note of personal sin. But it is to a
great extent unreal, and the declaration of absolution
follows far too cheaply and easily. Moreover, even
if such a beginning is appropriate sometimes, or to
some people, it is not always and equally appropriate
and when constantly repeated such confession be-
comes merely monotonous, exciting no feeling or in-
telligence whatever.
If a service is to be efficacious against sin, it should
deal with it far more
and continuously. If
seriously
felt as a reality sin is and should not
no light matter,
be casually slurred over. During such a service,
dominated by the sense of personal sinfulness and
contrition, the confession of the Communion service
is likely to be more effective than the other. The
Litany would be an appropriate continuation: many
things should precede a declaration of Remission.
But there should be more than one form of service
there might be at least three alternative forms —
sometimes one, sometimes another to be used. One
form of service should sound a different note; it
might be a service not of contrition but of praise.
It might open with the Benedictus, continue with the
General Thanksgiving, with the Te Deum, the Can-
tate, or the Venite —
without the Jewish ending if
possible —and so forth. And in all these services the
great and eloquent short prayers need never be omit-
ted, such as the prayer of St. Chrysostom, the Col-
lects for Peace and for Grace, and, when appropriate,
the Evening Collects, as also that for the special day,
—

together with Epistle and Gospel and of course the
Lessons.
But the multiplicity and wearisome number of ex-
tracts from the Psalter might be mitigated with ad-
vantage. The Psalms for the day might be omitted
altogether. There can be no need to work through
the whole Psalter every month: it is a useless burden;
besides, a few of the Psalms are hardly edifying in
worship, however instructive they are as historical
and biographical lessons.
At times of stress or anxiety a special selection of
prayers might be made, and at all times extempore
and spontaneous prayer should be permissible. It is
profoundly wrong that a petition from the heart of
a minister of God is never to be uttered
during Divine
service. It is an edict of suppression and impotence
for the reading desk: of dulness and starvation for
the pew. "For a certain measure of variety arrests
and engages the attention of worshippers, and sus-
*
tains their interest." The very name 'reading desk"
is full of wrong suggestions. The lectern is appro-
priately named, and so is the pulpit, but the spirit of
genuine supplication should brood over at least a part
of the service.
—
Another form of service where forms are used
might be dominated by the idea of collective or social
struggle and error, by the sense of national and cor-
porate sin, by effort after better conditions of exist-
ence for others, and by the spirit of public service.
Here would come the prayer for Royalty, for Parlia-
ment, for the Clergy, for aU people as well as others
;
appropriately chosen, and many added to suit the

needs of the time.
At all times it is appropriate to remember the sick
and suffering, the prisoners and captives, the deso-
late and oppressed; just as it is always natural to
pray for peace and in these cases prayer is not merely
;
intercessory prayer, but is a petition for the impulse

ourselves to do what lies in our own power to aid in
these so touching and so accessible ranges of activity
in direct human service.
The keynote of each service should be reality.
There should be no vain repetition and no mere form-
ulae recited in haste without attention to meaning.
At present far too much is attempted far too much —
in quantity, —and this perhaps is responsible for the
hurry and apparent desire to get through. Surely
everything said should be said deliberately and im-
pressively. Possibly, however, the present manner
of utterance is not really or solely dependent on the
amount to be got through in the time, but is a relic
of the Roman practice of reciting prayers in Latin,
so as not to be understanded of the common people;
with the object apparently of exciting vague emotion
undiluted with intelligence. The practice is vener-
able— but it is hardly consistent with the genius of
the Church of England. IntelligibiHty throughout
is surely not a thing to be deprecated, if it can be
secured. To this end the service should be short in

length, even though not always short in time. Non
multa sed viultum applies intensely to tlie effective
use of a Liturgy. A
quantity gabbled through is
useless and unimpressive. A
small amount really
driven home is far more effective. The Te Deum is j
specially effective when sung slowly and dehberately.
It was so sung in more than one church at the last
Declaration of Peace.
Above all, the Lord's Prayer, with its brief and
profound sentences, is not properly treated wîen sub-
jected to the gabble of a choir. Every sentence in-
volves thought. The single phrase "Thy Kingdom
come" speaks volumes, and by itself is sufficient for a
morning's worship. As a musician takes a theme and
develops it fugally and antiphonally ^\dth devices of
augmentation and diminution and mth illuminating
counterpoint, so could such a theme as this be made to
dominate and re-appear throughout a service. The
repetition of the Lord's Prayer several times in an
hour signifies the intention to use it as a sort of re-
frain; but as a refrain it is ineffective, the repetition I
is far too mechanical and careless. The clauses are

worthy of better treatment than that.
Take such a clause as "Thy will be done"; it em- —
braces the whole of rehgion. If I were a musician I
would set the Lord's Prayer to music, and with
clashes of instruments and with silences would bring
out a part of its meaning in unmistakable manner.^
The opening phrase "Our Father which art in
heaven" may in its full form exhibit signs of liturg-
ical growth or addition, but the note "Father," the
dominant of all the chords, is authentic enough. It
1 When I wrote this " The Kingdom " had not been produced, and I
did not then know the scheme of Sir Edward Elgar's work.
is all that appears in Luke (Hort and Westcott's

text) , and it is enough.
Wider Education
We need only refer in very general terms to the
sort of education appropriate to a candidate for the
Ministry of the Gospel. He must be instructed in
—
professional subjects, of course I say nothing about
those but ; it is plain that if he is to have any influence
on the thought of his time, he must not be ignorant
of that thought. If he is to mix with people, and
adapt himself to various conditions of men, he must
be able to retain their respect. Immersion in the at-
mosphere of scholastic theology alone will not suffice.
The Bible is a literature with which he must be famil-
iar, but he must not be a man of one book. If he
knows only the Bible, he will not know that. broad A
and general education should be his, and the discov-
eries ofage should not be alien to him. In the
his
course of his career heis bound to meet argumentative
sceptics; men sometimes of narrow sympathies, but

occasionally of fairly wide reading. These he should
be able to encounter on their own ground.
It is true that to take a leading position, and to
grasp a considerable range of human knowledge, is
not given to all; there must be some whose lives are
cast amid simpler surroundings, and who will there
feelmore at home. That is well; but we are consider-
ing the ideal up to which a few can be trained, while
the majority will rise towards it as far as they can,
though they fall short of attainment. Tlie ideal for
a minister of Christ to-day is not represented by that
held out in the charge of the Ordination ser\dce, "ap-
ply yourselves wholly to this one thing, and draw all
your cares and studies tliis way;" it is not enough, nor
is it even wise, to hmit study to one thing, and to for-
sake and set aside all other studies.

Certainly something just and needful is intended,
by that warning against worldly cares and studies,
but hable to be misunderstood. And even in af-
it is
fairsof business, it may be argued that as so many

of the clergy have to address men of business, it
would be Aîse for them not to be wholly ignorant and
incompetent even in that atmosphere. It is no easy
service which the nation demands of its religious
—
teachers it is the highest and most difficult possible;
and the very best and ablest men are needed for the
work, if it is to be done properly. At present many
a;re deflected to other careers. In some cases the
deflection is due to attraction elsewhere; but in too
many it must happen that a faithful and competent
man is either consciously or unconsciously repelled by
the demands and injunctions placed in his wây, —by
the attempt made to scare his present conscience or to
snare his future one. He knows that the critical
spirit isnot the spirit of worship but he knows also
;
that, however successfully his critical faculty may be

put to sleep for a time, it will rise and torment him
later on if he abandons his birthright of growth and
freedom. So he chooses another vocation.
Tests
And now, what about tests? What tests should be

applied to candidates for ordination, so as to exclude
self-seeking hypocrites and stealthy infidels? What-
ever words are used, the test-formula should be said
by the candidate himself, not by another for him and ;
it should be said without prompting. The amount of

memory needed, for a simple rehearsal like that, is not
too much to expect from a man to whom preaching
and the cure of souls is to be entrusted. simple A
form should suffice: why should not the following be
held sufficient?
Here, solemnly in the face of this congregation, I
declare before Almighty God, to whose holy will I
entirely submit myself, that I long for Christ's ideal
of the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth; and, God
helping me, I will with all my power and ability
strive to this end and to no other, with such wisdom
as it may please the Holy Spirit to confer upon me;
for whose guidance I will always pray to the Father,
in the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Such a made in full voice and with
declaration,
uplifted hand, would be far more solemn and impres-
sive as an answer to the question whether he thinks
he is truly called to the ministry of the Church, than
the present curious expected answer, "I think so."
Some further declaration on the secular side,
against the domination of any foreign potentate in
this realm, and some precautionary statement against
Jesuitical interpretation and underground scheming,
—
would seem to be necessary also. Moreover, it would
be desirable so to legislate that no weapon of super-
stition could ever be wielded, by Church authority, so
as to inflict on the element of compulsion
laity that
from which the clergy had been freed. It is to be
hoped that certain anti-English auricular practices
will never be permitted in the National Church, how-
ever comprehensive it may become.
Re-incorporation
This article ought to close with practical sugges-

tions as to how Nonconformist bodies are to be re-
incorporated into the National Church but that must
;
be left to others. I know that at the time of writing

an unexpected and most regrettable recrudescence of
has arisen between the State Church and the
hostilities
—
Free Churches animosity breaking out over the
—
primary education of the children of the poor show-
ing that the pugnacious spirit was only dormant, and
that any immediately practical suggestions towards
general Christian co-operation would be untimely.
But surely such a state of things can only be tem-
porary. Either some mutual understanding is possi-
ble on such a subject, or the country is on the verge of
an era of secularism.
It may be that thorough union will come only
—
through disestablishment ^that a truly comprehen-
sive National Church is impossible. That is one way
towards freedom of conscience. Either the State
Church must be enlarged, broadened, and liberated
—
freed from exclusive dignities too dearly bought,

or it must cease to be a State Church.
I will not attempt to forecast the course of history:

all that I am concerned to urge is union, for the pur-
pose of fighting a common foe, cessation of interne-

cine quarrels, unison of effort among all the branches
of the Church of Christ. To me it seems that, as soon
as artificial restrictions and disabilities are removed,
the re-incorporation will be almost automatic or —
would be so were it not for the question of pre-restora-
tion endowments. If a money question is all that
—
would then hinder union if there is nothing more
serious and fundamental than property to be con-
—
sidered it would be a fact worth finding out.
My attention has just been called to certain articles
on Church and State, issued in 1891 by Dr. Martin-
eau as vol. ii. of his collected Essays, Reviews, and
Addresses, Some of them deal with this very matter,
especially the essay called "The National Church as a
Federal Union." He pointed out the inconsistency
of a Church priding itself, simultaneously, both on
its rigorous uniformity and on the width of the range
of its belief; and says that while the Acts of Uni-

formity remain, the work of the Church will be
honeycombed by the canker of unveracity and self-
sophistication.
I will not repeat his arguments and proposals, for
whether those particular proposals are hopeless or
not, the spirit of his vision of the unity of Christen-
—
dom the longing to see the various folds all one
flock, in accordance with the parting prayer of Christ,
"for them which shall believe on me . . . that they
all —
may be one" remains as real as ever. Moreover,
many of the non-established Churches are riper for
union among themselves now than they were even a
short time ago and I will quote the concluding words
;
of the preface to the volume containing Martineau's

ecclesiastical essays:
"I cannot withdraw a protest, however hopeless
it may seem, against allowing the Christian Church
to remain a mere cluster of rival orthodoxies, disown-
ing and repelling each other; while, in the inmost
heart ofall, secret affections live and pray, with eye
upturned to the same Infinite Perfection, and tears

let fall for the same universal sorrows."
SECTION III— THE IMMORTALITY OF
THE SOUL
The substance of this section was given as the first lecture on the
Drew foundation established in connexion with Hackney College, Lon-
don, under the presidency of Dr. Forsyth.
141
—
CHAPTER VIII
THE TRANSITORY AND THE PERMANENT

Part I
"If a man is shut up in a house, the transparency of the windows is
an essential condition of his seeing the sky. But it would not be prudent
to infer that, if he walked out of the house, he could not see the sky
because there was no longer any glass through which he might see it."
M'Taggart, Some Dogmas of Religion, p. 105.
M'TAGGART, in book called Soine

DR.Dogmas of Religion, from which I have taken
his
the excellent apologue ^ prefixed as a sort of motto to

this article, says some things with which I am not able
wholly to agree. I should like to deal with these at
greater length in some other connexion, but mean-
while I will quote one of them. In his chapter on
Human Immortality he says that an affirmative an-
swer to the question "Has man an immortal soul?"
would be absurd. He wishes to maintain that man
is a soul rather than that he has one because the pos- ;
sessive case would indicate, he says, that the man

himself was his body, or was something that died with
the body, and that he owned something, not himself,
which at death was set free.
1 This must not be understood as sustaining what Mr. Ilaldane de-
risively calls the"window" theory of the senses, as if they were apertures
through which an inner man looked out at an alien universe: a parable
must not be pressed unduly.
143
—
144 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

But if we make the correlative statement, and say
that"man has a body," surely we are stating an un-
deniable truth. And as to what the man himself is
I apprehend that he is a union of soul and body; and

that ^^dthout the one or the other he is incomplete as
a man, and becomes sometliing else — a corpse per-
haps, a spirit perhaps, or it may be both. But
whereas the two were necessarily united during the
man's life, death separates them; and the final pro-
duct, whatever it is, can be described as "man" no
longer. Hence the form of the question preferred
by Dr. M'Taggart, "Are men immortal?" does not
seem to me so ap|)ropriate as the more popular and
antique form, "Is the soul immortal?" For surely
without hesitation everybody must give to his ques-
tion, about man, the answer: "Xot wholly," or "Xot
every part of him." Part of what constitutes human
nature is certainly mortal. On one side man un-
doubtedly belongs to the animal kingdom, and flour-
ishes on this planet, the Earth, by aid of particles of
terrestrial matter which he utilises for that purpose.
By the soul, then, we must mean that part of man
which is dissociated from the body at death that part
:
which is characteristic of a hving man as distinct from

a corpse. It may be said that it is really more an
inter-relation than a part, and that this inter-relation
is what is meant by vitality; so that it has been roundly
asserted that the apparently disappeared "vitality" is

a nonentity or figment of the imagination, and that to
speak of it as still existing is like speaking of the
THE TRANSITORY AND THE PERMANENT 145
"horologity" of a clock which someone has smashed

with a hammer.
Very well, admitting that vitahty is a mere relation
between the body and something else, it is just the
nature of this "something else" that we are discussing;
and it is no help to start by assuming that this dissoci-
ated and perhaps imaginary portion him- is the man
self, any more than it is helpful to start with the
equally gratuitous assumption that the visible and

tangible body is the man himself.
The vanished constituent with its attributes may
turn out to be more intimately characteristic of, and
essential to, theman's real nature and existence, than
is the material instrument or organ which has been
discarded without having disappeared they may turn :
out to have a more permanent and therefore a more

real existence than the temporary vehicle which served
to manifest those attributes and properties during
their short tenure of earth life they may be more es-
;
pecially the seat of his personality and individuality;

— but those are just the things which are subject-
matter for debate, and they must not be postulated a
priori.
As a matter of nomenclature, I want to discrimi«
nate between the term "vitality" and the term *'life";
to use theformer as signifying a union or relation be-
tween the body and something else, and the latter to
denote the unknown entity which by interaction with
material particles is responsible for their vitality.
True, life, thus defined, is a portion or partial aspect
:

of what is often spoken of as "soul," but the term hfe
can be used by many to whom some of the associations
of the more comprehensive term are objectionable.
The first simple and important truth that must be
insisted on, is the comitnonplace but often ignored and
even denied fact, that there is nothing immortal or
persistent about the material instrument of our pres-
ent senses, except the atoms of which it is composed.
Any notion that these same atoms will at some
future date be re-collected and united with the dis-
sociated and immaterial portion, so as to constitute
once more the complete man as he appeared here on
earth, who is thereafter to last for ever, —any notion
of that sort, though most unfortunately believed, or
at least taught, by one great branch of the Christian
Church, is a superstition, not by any means yet really
and thoroughly extinct or without influence on senti-
ment, even in quarters where it may be denied in
wôrds. It is t-oo much to expect that is should be so
extinct.
INêvertheless, the teaching of natural science is in
accordance with the teaching of common sense in tliis
matter. The present body is wholly composed of ter-
restrial particles; it consists of atoms of matter col-
lected from food and air, and arranged in a certain
complicated and characteristic f«rm. The elemental
atoms are combined into the complex aggregate
first
called protoplasm, which is an unstable compound

whose chemical constitution is at present unknown,
but whose property it is to be always in a state of flux
it is not rigid or stagnant or fixed, but is constantly
breaking down into simpler constituents on one side,

and constantly being renewed or built up on the other,
so that it has a kind of life-history, for a certain per-
iod. This period of activity, in any given case, lasts
as long as the balance between association and disso-
ciation continues. While the balance is tilting in
favour of assimilation, we have the period of youth
and growth when the balance begins to tilt in favour
;
of disintegration, we have the commencement of old

age and decay until at a certain, or rather an uncer-
;
tain, stage, the disintegrating forces gain a final

victory, and assimilation wholly and sometimes sud-
denly ceases. Then by slow degrees the
presently and
residue of protoplasm left in the body unless it is —
speedily incorporated into some other animal or plant
— is resolved into similar and simpler compounds, and
ultimately into inorganic constituents; and so is re-

stored to mother Earth, whence it sprang.
What, then, can be legitimately meant by the
phrase Resurrection of the body? Well it is highly
desirable to disentangle the element of truth which
underlies ancient beliefs and is the condition of their
durability; and, whatever may be the case with other
forms of religion, it is clear that Christianity both by
its doctrines and its ceremonies rightly emphasises the
material aspect of existence. For it isfounded upon
the idea of incarnation and its belief
; in some sort of
bodily resurrection is based on the idea that every real
personal existence must have a double aspect not —
spiritual alone, nor physical alone, but in some way
both. Such an opinion, in a refined form, is common
to many systems of philosophy and is by no means
out of harmony with science.
Christianity, therefore, reasonably supplements the
mere survival of a discarnate spirit, a homeless wan-
derer or melancholy ghost, with the warm and com-
fortable clothing of something that may legitimately
be spoken of as a "body" ; that is to say it postulates
a supersensually appreciable vehicle or mode of mani-
festation, fitted to subserve the needs of future ex-
istence as our bodies subserve the needs of terrestrial
life: an etherial or other entity constituting the per-
sistent "other aspect," and fulfilling some of the func-
tions which the atoms of terrestrial matter are con-
strained to fulfil now. And we may assume, as con-
sonant with or even as part of Christianity, the doc-
trineof the dignity and sacramental character of some
physical or quasi-material counterpart of every spirit-
ual essence.
But though some such connexion is essential, any
actual instance of it may be accidental and temporary.
Take our present incarnation as an example. We
display ourselves to mankind in the garb of certain
clothes, artificially constructed of animal and vegeta-
ble materials, and in the form of a certain material
organism, put together by processes of digestion and
assimilation and likewise composed of terrestrial ma-
terials. The source of these chemical compounds is
e\ddently not important ; nor is their special character
maintained. Whether they formed part of sheep or
and be-
birds or fish or plants, they are assimilated
come part of us being arranged by our subconscious
;
activities and vital processes into appropriate form,

just as truly as other materials are consciously woven
into garments, no matter what their origin. More-
over, just as our clothes wear out and require darning
and patching, so our bodies wear out; the particles
are in continual flux, each giving place to others and
being constantly discarded and renewed. The identity
of the actual or instantaneous body is therefore an
affair of no importance: the body which finally dies
is no more fully representative of the individual than
any of the other bodies which have gradually been dis-

carded en route : there is no reason why it should per-
sist any more than they: the individuality, if there is
one, must lie deeper than any particular body, and

must belong to whatever it is which put the particles
together in this shape and not another.
There is nothing at all similar to this automatic de-
cay and replacement, this preservation of form amid
diversity of particles, in the mechanism of a clock.
All that its "horologity" could mean would be the
special assemblage or grouping of parts which enables
it to fulfil certain functions it wears out, or so
till
long as its worn parts are periodically replaced by the

clockmaker. The "vitality" of an organism means
this and more, for it can replace its own worn parts.
A clock has nothing of personal identity, it is not a
good of a living organism. The identity
illustration
of a river is a much closer analogy and many are the
;
associations which have accordingly gathered round

thenames "Tiber," "Ganges," "Nile." Rivers have
always had attributed to them a kind of poetic per-
—

sonality,though no one can have really supposed them
to possess genuine life.
I wish here to make a short digression in order to
say that the old and true statement that "everything
flows and nothing is stagnant," thus conspicuously ex-
emplified by the material basis of life, need not in the

least signify, as sometimes taken to signify, that
it is
everything is evanescent and nothing is permanent;

still less than everything is fanciful and nothing is
real. The ancient aphorism of the inspired Hera-

clitus makes a statement about existence which is
vitally and comprehensively true; and it is a truth
which constitutes the keynote of evolution.
To return. The more frankly and clearly the truth
about the body is realised, namely, that the body is a
flowing and constantly changing episode in material
history, having no more identity than has a river, no
identity whatever in its material constitution, but only
in its form, — identity only in the personal expression
or manifestation which is achieved through the agency
of a fresh and constantly differing sequence of ma-
terial particles, — the more frankly all this is realised,
the better for our understanding of most of the prob-
lems of life and being.
The body is the instrument or organ of the soul:
and in its special form and aggregation is certainly
—
temporary, exceedingly temporary, for in the most
durable cases it lasts only about a thousand months
a mere instant in the life-history of a planet.
But if the body is thus trivial and temporary,
— ;
though while it lasts most beautiful and useful and

wonderful, what is it that puts it together and keeps
it active and retains it fairly constant through all the
vicissitudes of climate and condition, and through all

the fluctuations of material constitution?
For remember that we are now not dealing with the
human body alone. All animals have bodies and so
have plants. All that has been said, of the tem-
porary character of the material aggregate animated
by life, applies to a vast variety of organisms, many
of which can be encountered on the earth not to speak:
of the myriads of other worlds.

What causes the very same particles to be incor-
porated first into the form of a blade of grass, then
into the form of a sheep, then into the form of a man
then into the form of some law invertebrates "politic
—
worms" (for whose existence, however, in normal
cases there is, I believe, no biological authority),
then perhaps into a bird, then once more into vegeta-
tion— perhaps a tree? What is it that combines and
arranges the particles, so that if absorbed by root or
leaves they correspond to and form the tissue of an
oak, if picked up by talons, they help to feed the mus-
cles of an eagle, if cooked for dinner, they enter into
the nerves and brain of a man? What is the control-
ling entity in each case, which causes each to have its
own form and not another, and preserves the form

constant amid the widest diversity of particles?
We call it life, we call it soul, we by various
call it
names, and we do not know what it is. But conmiou
152 THE IMMORT.ILITY OF THE SOUL
sense rebels against its being ''notliing*': nor has any
genuine science presumed to declare that it is purely
imagmary.
Let us now, therefore, try to define what we mean
by "soul,'' though in our necessary ignorance the task
is not easy. The term is mdeed so ambiguous that
many may tliuik it is better avoided altogether; but
the more precise term ''mind'' is too narrow and exclu-
sive for our present jourpose.
The f oUowuig definition may sufficiently represent
my j^resent meaning: The soul is that controlhng
and guiding principle wliich is responsible for our per-
sonal expression and for the construction of the body,
under the restrictions of physical condition and an-
cestry. In its liigher development it includes also
feehng and intelhgence and will, and is the store-
house of mental experience. The body is its instru-
ment or organ, enabling it to receive and to convey
physical impressions, and to affect and be affected by
matter and energy.
YvTien the body is destroyed, therefore, the soul dis-
appears from physical ken; when the body is impaired,
its fmiction is interfered with, and the soul's physical
reaction becomes feeble and unsatisfactory. Thus

has arisen the popular misconception that the soul of
a slain person or of a cripple or parahi:ic has been des-
troyed or damaged; whereas only its instrument of
manifestation need have been affected. The kind of
evils which really assault and hurt the soul belong to
a different catego^^^
It may be said that, m so far as soul is responsible
;
for bodily shape, soul seems identical with the princi-

ple of life, and that all living things must possess
some rudiment of soul.
Well, for myself, I do not see how to draw a hard-
and-fast distinction between one form of life and
another. All are animated by something which does
not belong to the realm of physics and chemistry, but
lies outside their province, though it interacts with the
material entities of their realm. Life is not matter,

nor is it energy, it is a guiding and directing prin-
ciple and when considered as incorporated in a certain
;
organism, it, and all that appertains to it, may well

be called the soul or constructive and controlling
element in that organism.
The soul in this sense is related to the organism in
somewhat the same way as the "Logos" is related to
the universe ; it is that without which it does not exist,
that which vivifies and constructs, or composes and in-
forms, the whole.
Moreover, in the higher organisms the soul con-
spicuously has lofty potentialitiesit not only includes
;
what is connoted by the term "mind," but it begins to

acquire some of the character of "spirit"; by which
means it becomes related to the Divine Being. Soul
appears to be the link between "spirit" and "matter"
and, according to its grade, it may be chiefly associ-
ated with one or with the other of these two great as-
pects of the universe.
Now let us consider what is meant by Immortality.

Is there anything that is not subject to death and an-
niliiiation? Can we predicate immortality about any-
tiiing? Ever}i:hiiig is subject to change, but are all
tilings subject to death? Without change there could
be no activity, and the universe would be stagnant;
but without death it is not so clear that its progress
would be obstructed: unless death be onlv a sort of
change.
But is it not a sort of change? Consider some ex-
amples When a piece of coal is burnt and brought
:
to an apparent end, the particles of long-fossihsed

wood are not destroyed; they enter into the atmos-
phere as gaseous constituents, and the long-locked-
up solar energy is released from its potential form
and appears once more as hght and heat. The burn-
mg of the coal is a kind of resurrection and yet it is ;
a kind of death too, and to the superficial eye notliing

is left but ashes.
I
Take next the destruction of a picture or a statue,
let it be torn to pieces or mashed to powder: there is
nothing to suggest resurrection about that, and the
beautiful form embodied in the material has disap-
peared.
Such a dissolution is a more serious matter, and
may be the result of a really mahcious act. It is per-
haps the nearest approach to genuine destruction that
is possible to man, and in some cases represents the
material concomitant of a hideous crmie. True, noth-
ing material is destroyed, the particles weigh just as
much as before yet the expression is gone, the beauty
;
is defaced, an idea perhaps is lost.
Eut, after all, the idea was never reallv in the

marble or in the pigments it was embodied or incar-

;
nate or displayed by them, in a sense, but it was not

really there. It was in the mind of the artist who
constructed the work, and it entered the mind of the
—
spectators who beheld it at least of those who had
the requisite perceptive faculty; but it was never in
the stone at all. The from the impress
inert material,
of mind it had received, was able to call out and liber-
ate in a kindred mind some of the original feelings and
thoughts which had gone to fashion it. Without a
perceptive faculty, without a sympathetic mind, the
material was powerless. Set up in, or sent to, a
world inhabited only by lower animals, it would con-
vey no message whatever, it would be wholly mean-
ingless; just as a piece of manuscript would be, in
such a world, though it contained the divinest poem
ever written.
Nevertheless, by the supposed act of vandalism a
certain incarnation of beauty has been lost to the
world. Though even so it is not destroyed out of the
universe : it remains the possession of the artist and of
those privileged to feel along with him.
Consider next the destruction of a tree or of an ani-
mal. Here again the particles remain as many as be-
fore, it is only their arrangement that is altered; the
matter isconserved but has lost its shape the energy ;
is constant in quantity but has changed its form.

What has disappeared? The thing that has disap-
peared is the life —the life which appeared to be in
the tree or the animal, the life which had composed or
constructed it by aid of sunshine and almospherc, and
was manifested by it. Its incarnate form has now
—
gone no more will that Hf e be displayed amidst its
old surroundings, it has disappeared from our ken;
apparently it has disappeared from the j^lanet. Has
it gone out of existence altogether ?
If it were really generated de iwco, created out of

nothing, at the bu'th of the animal or of the tree, we
should be entitled to assume that at death it may have
returned to the nonentity whence it came.
But why nonentity? What do we know of nonen-
tit^'? Is it a reasonable or conceiA'able idea? Things
when they vanish are only liidden. And so con-
versely: it is some existence,
readily intelligible that
some bodily presentation, can be evoked out of a
hidden or imperceptible or latent or potential exist-
ence, and be made actual and perceptible and what we
call real. Instances of that sort are constantly oc-
curring. It occurs when a composer produces a piece
of music, it occurs when an artisan constructs a piece
of furniture, it occurs when a spider spins a web, and
when the atmosphere deposits dew. But what ex-
ample can we think of where existence is created out
of nonentitv, where nothinor- turns into somethino^?
We can think of plenty of examples of change, of or-
ganisation, of something apparently complex and
highly developed arising out of a germ apparently
simple: but there must always be at least a seed, or
notliing îll arise; nothing can come out of notliing:
something must always have its origin in something.
A radium atom is an element possessing in itself
the seeds of its ovm destruction. Everv now and then
;
it explodes and fires off a portion of itself. This can

occur several times in succession, and finally it seems
to become inert and to cease to be radium or anything
like it; it is thought by some to have become lead,
while the particles thrown off have become helium, or
occasionally neon, or sometimes argon. Let us sup-
pose that. We cannot stop there, we are bound to go
on to ask what was the origin of the radium itself.
If it explodes itself to pieces in the course of a few
thousand years, why does any radium still exist?
How is it being born? Does it spring into existence
out of nothing, or has it some parent? And if it has
a parent, what was the origin of that parent?
Never in physical science do we surmise for a
moment that something suddenly springs into being
from previous non-existence. All that we perceive
can be accounted for by changes of aggregation, by
assemblage and dispersion. Of material aggregates
we can trace the history, as we can trace the history of
continents and islands, of suns and planets and stars
we can say, or try to say, whence they arose and what
they will become but never do we state that they will
;
vanish into nothingness, nor do we ever conjecture

that they arose from nothing.
It is true that in religion we seek to trace things
farther back and ultimately say that everything
still,
arose from God; and there, perforce, our chain of ex-

istence, our links of antecedence and sequence must
cease. But to allow such a statement to act as an in-
tellectual refuge can only be a concession to human
infirmity. Everything truly arose from God; but
there is notlimg" specially illuminating in such a state-
ment as that, for ever}i:hing is in God now and every-
;
thing will continue to be animated and sustained by

God to all eternity. It is not legitimate explicitly to
introduce the idea of God to explain the past alone;
the term applies equally to the present and to the
future.
So the assertion just made, though true enough, is
only a mode of saying that what was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be, world without end. This
isa rehgious mode of expressing our con^dction of the
uniformity of the Eternal Character, but it is not a
statement which adds to our scientific information.
We may not be able to understand Xature, we are
certainly unable to comprehend God. If we say that
Nature is an aspect of the Di^dne Being, we must be
speaking truly but that only strengthens our present
;
argument as to its durability and permanence, for we

shall certainly not thus be led to attribute to anytliing
so qualified any power of either jumping into or
jumping out of existence. To make the statement
that Xature is an aspect of the Godliead is explicitly
to postulate eternity for every really existing thing,
and to say that what we call death is not anniliilation
but only change. Birth is change. Death is change.
A happy change, perhaps a melancholy change, per-
;
haps. That all depends upon circumstances and

special cases, and on the point of view from which
things are regarded; but, anyhow, an inevitable
change.
I want to make the distinct assertion that no really
existing thing perishes, but only changes itsform.

Physical science teaches us this, clearly enough, con-
cerning matter and energy the two great entities with
:
which it has to do. And no likelihood of any

there is
great modification in this teaching. It may, perhaps,

be induced in the long-run to modify the form of
statement and to assert conservation and real existence
of ether and motion (or, perhaps only, of ether in
motion) rather than of matter and energy. That is
quite possible, but the apparent variation of statement
is only a variant in form its essence and meaning are
;
the same, except that it is now more general and would

allow even the atoms of matter themselves to have
their day and cease to be being resolved, perhaps, into
;
electricity, and that into some hitherto unimagined

mode of motion of the ether. But all this is far from
being accepted at present, and need not here be con-
sidered.
The distinction between what is transitory and
what is permanent is Evanescence is to
quite clear.
be stated concerning every kind of "system" and ag-
gregation and grouping. A
crowd assembles, and
then it disperses: it is a crowd no more. cloud A
forms in the sky, and soon once more the sky is blue
again; the cloud has died. Dew forms on a leaf: a
little while, and it has gone again
—
gone ai:)parently
into nothingness, like the cloud. But we know better,
both for cloud and dew. In an imperceptible form it
was and soon an imperceptible form it will again
into
have passed; but meanwhile there is the dewdrop
glistening in the sun, reflecting all the movements of
the neighbouring world, and contributing its little
share to the beauty and the serviceableness of creation.

Its perceptible or incarnate existence is temporary.
As a drop was born, and as a drop it dies; but as
it
aqueous vapour it persists an intrinsically imperisha-

:
ble substance, with all the properties persisting which

enabled it to condense into drop or cloud. Even it,
therefore, has the attribute of immortality.

So, then, what about life? Can that be a nonentity
which has built up particles of carbon and hydrogen
and oxygen into the form of an oak or an eagle or a
man? Is it something which is really nothing; and
soon shall it be manifestly the nothing that an ig-
norant and purbhnd creature may suppose it to be?
Not so nor is it so with intellect and consciousness
;
and will, nor with memory and love and adoration,

nor all the manifold activities which at present
strangely interact with matter and appeal to our
bodily senses and terrestrial knowledge; they are not
nothing, nor shall they ever vanish into nothingness
or cease to be. They did not arise with us they never :
did spring into being they are as eternal as the God-

;
head itself, and in the eternal Being they shall endure

for ever.
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be.
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee."
So sang Emily Bronte on her deathbed, in a poem

which Mr. Haldane quotes in full, in his Gifford Lec-
tures, as containing true philosophy. And, surely
THE TRANSITORY AND THE PERMANENT. l6l
in this respect there is a unity running through the

universe, and a kinship between the human and the
Divine: witness the eloquent ejaculation of Carlyle:
"What, then, is What, then, is man!
man!
*'He endures but for an hour, and is crushed before
the moth. Yet in the being and in the working of a
faithful man is there already (as all faith from the
beginning, gives assurance) a something that pertains
not to this wild death-element of Time that triumphs
;
over Time, and is, and will be, when Time shall be no
more."
—
CHAPTER IX
THE PERMANENCE OF PERSONALITY
Part II
"After death the soul possesses self-consciousness, otherwise it would
be the subject of spiritual death, which has already been disproved.
With this self-consciousness necessarily remains personality and the
consciousness of personal identity." Kaxt, quoted by Heixze.
preceding chapter on "The Transitory and

IXthethePermanent," permanence was claimed for the
essence, the intrinsic reahty, the soul of anything; and
transitoriness for its bodily presentment —that is, for
aU such things as special groupings, arrangements,
systems, which are liable to break up into their con-
stituent elements, and cease to cohere into a united
and organised aggregate. The only real destruction
known to us, in fact, is this disintegration or breaking
up of an assemblage: things themselves never spring
into or out of existence. All we can cause or can ob-
serve is variety of motion —
never creation or annihila-
tion. Andeven the motion is transferred from one
body to another, and transformed in the process it is ;
not generated from nothing, nor can it be destroyed.

Special groupings and appearances are transitory; it
is their intrinsic and constructive essence which is per-

manent.
But then, what about personahty, individuality, our
162
•
THE PERMANENCE OF PERSONALITY 163
own character and self? Are these akin to the tem-

porary groupings which shall be dissolved, or are they
among the substantial realities that shall endure?
liCt us see how to define the idea of personality or
personal and individual character :
—A memory, a con-
sciousness, and a will, in so far as they form a consis-
tent harmonious whole, constitute a personality which ;
thus has relations with the past, the present, and the
future. And we shallargue that personality or indi-
viduality itself dominates and transcends all temporal
modes of expression, and so is essentially eternal
wherever it exists.
The life of an insect or a tree may in some sort —

must, one would think, in some sort — persist, but
surely not its personal character! Why not? Be-
cause, presumably, it has none. We can hardly im-
agine that such a thing has any individuality or per-
sonality appears to us to be merely one of a group,
: it
a mere unit in a world of being, without personality

of its own. That is what I assume, though I do not
dogmatise; nor do I consider it certain, for some of
the higher animals. Anyhow we may admit at once
that, for all those things which only share in a gen-
eral life, the temporarily separated portion of that
general life will return, undifferentiated and unident-
ified, to its central store: just as happens in the bet-
ter-understood categories of matter and energy.

That is simple enougli. But suppose that some in-
dividual character, some personality, docs exist.
Su])pose that not only life, but intellect and emotion
and consciousness and will are all associated with a
certain physical organism; and suppose that these
things have a real and undeniable existence —an ex-
istence strengthened and compacted by experience
and suffering and joy, till it is no longer only a func-
tion of the material aggregate in which for a time it
is embodied, but belongs to a universe of spirit closely

related to immanent and transcendent Diety; what
then? If all that really exists, in the highest sense, is
immortal, we have only to ask whether our person-

ality, our character, our self, is sufficiently individual,
sufficiently characteristic, sufficiently developed, —in
a word, sufficiently real; for if it is, there can then be
no doubt of its continuance. It may return, indeed,
in some sense, to the central store, but not without
identity; its individual character will be preserved.
Conservation or Value
Professor Hoffding of Copenhagen goes farther
than this. In his book on the Philosophy of Religion
he teaches that what he calls the axiom of "the con-
servation of value" is the fundamental ingredient in
all religions —
the foundation without which none of
them could stand. In his view, as a philosopher,
agreeing therein with Browning and other poets, no
real Value or Good is ever lost. The whole progress
and course of evolution is to increase and intensify
the Valuable —that which "avails" or is serviceable
for highest purposes, —and it does so by bringing
out that which was potential or latent, so as to make
it actual and real. Real it was, no doubt, all the time
in some sense, as an oak is implicit in an acorn or a
THE PERMANENCE OF PERSONALITY; 165
flower in a bud, but in process of time it unfolds and

adds to the realised Value of the universe.
To carry out this idea we might define immortality
thus:
Immortality is the persistence of the essential and
the real: it appUes to things which the universe has
—
gained things which, once acquired, cannot be let
go. It is an example of the conservation of Value.
The tendency of evolution is to increase the actuality
of Value, converting it from a potential into an avail-
able form.
Value may, however, be something more than
merely constant in quantity, according to Professor
Hoffding. Experience of evolution suggests that
itmust increase. Certainly it passes from latent to
more patent forms; and though it sometimes swings
back, yet, on the whole, progress seems upward. Is
it not legitimate to conjecture that while JNIatter and
Energy increase nor decrease, but only
neither
change inform; and while life too perhaps is con-
stant in quantity, though alternating into and out of
incarnation according as material organisms are put
together or worn out; yet that some of the higher
attributes of existence, —
love, shall we say, joy per-
haps, what may be generalised as Good generally, or
as Availabihty or Vahie, —may actual!}^ increase:
their apparent alternations being really the curves of
an upward-tending spiral? It is an optimistic faith,
but it is the faith of the poets and seers. Whatever
evil days may fall upon an individual or a nation, or
even sometimes on a whole planet, yet the material is
subordinate to the spiritual; and if the spiritual per-
sists, it cannot be stationary : it must surely rise in the
scale of existence. For evil is that which retards or
frustrates development, in any part of the universe
subject to its sway, and, accordingly, its kingdom
cannot stand: evil contains an essentially suicidal ele-
ment, so that on the whole the realm of the good must
tend to increase, the realm of the bad to diminish.
"Xo existing universe can tend on the whole to-
wards contraction and decay because that would fos-
;
ter annihilation, and so any incipient attempt would

not have survived; consequently an actually existing
and Solving universe must on the whole cherish de-
velopment, expansion, growth: and so tend towards
infinity rather than towards zero. The problem is
therefore only a variant of the general problem of
existence. Given existence, of a non-stagnant kind,
and ultimate development must be its law. Good and
evil can be defined in terms of development and decay
respectively. This may be regarded as part of a
revelation of the nature of God" {The Substance of
Faith).
From this
point of view the law of evolution is that
Good on the whole increase in the universe with
shall
the process of the suns: that immortahty itself is a
special case of a more general Law, namely, that in
the whole universe nothing really finally perishes that
isworth keeping, that a thing once attained is not
thrown away.
The general mutability and mortality in the world
need not perturb us. The things we see perishing
and dying are not of the same kind as those which

we hope will endure. Death and decay, as we know
them, are interesting physical processes, which may
be studied and understood; they have seized the im-
agination of man, and govern his emotions, perhaps
unduly, but there is nothing in them to suggest ulti-
mate destruction, or the final triumph of ill; they are

necessary correlatives to conception and birth into a
material world; they do not really contradict an opti-
mistic view of existence.
So far as we can tell, there need be no real waste,
no real loss, no annihilation; but everything suffi-

ciently valuable, be it beauty, artistic achievement,
knowledge, unselfish affection, may be thought of as
enduring henceforth and for ever if not with an in-
dividual and personal existence, yet as part of the
eternal Being of God.
Permanent Element in Man

And this carries with it the persistence of person-
ality in all creatures who have risen to the attainment
bf God-like faculties, such as self-determination and
other attributes which suggest kinship with Deity
and make their possessor a member of the Divine
family. For whether or not this incipient theory of
the conservation of value stand the test of criticism,
it isundeniable that, as in the quotation from Carlyle
at the end of my last article, seers do not hesitate to
attribute permanence and timeless existence to the
essential element in man himself. Tliey realise that
he is one with the universe, that he may come to be in
tune with the infinite, and that his spasmodic efforts
towards a state wherein the average will rise to a level
now attained by only the few, are part of the evolu-
tionary travailing of the whole creation. "All
omens," says Myers, "point towards the steady con-
tinuance of just such labour as has already taught us
all we know. Perhaps, indeed, in this complex of in-
terpenetrating spirits our own effort is no individual,
no transitory, thing. That which lies at the root of
each of us lies at the root of the Cosmos too. Our
struggle is the struggle of the Universe itself; and
the very Godliead finds fulfilment through our up-
ward-striving souls" (Myers, Human Personality, ii.
p. 277).
To return to the problem of individual existence
and to a more prosaic atmosphere. What we are
claiming is no less than this —
that, whereas it is cer-
tain that the present body cannot long exist without
the soul, it is quite possible and indeed necessary for
the soul to exist without the present body. We base
this claim on the soul's manifest transcendence, on its
genuine reality, and on the general law of the per-
sistence of all real existence.
Recognition of the permanent element in man and
of the probability of his individual survival, ^that —
is to say, of the persistence of intelligence and mem-
ory after the destruction of the brain if such re- —

cognition is to be of the greatest use to mankind,
should be based on general considerations open and
familiar to all, and be independent of special study
with results verified by only a few. But if general
arguments are and if the reader has pa-

insufficient,
tience with a more specific Hne of investigation, then
I submit that the question can also be studied by the
aid of observation and experiment, and that a con-
viction of persistence of personahty can be strength-
ened by the record and discovery of specific facts.
Expression of Thought in Terms of Motion

The brain is definitely the Hnk between the psy-
chical and the physical, which in themselves belong to
different orders of being. In the psychical region
"thought" is the dominant reality; in the physical
"motion." The bodily organism mysteriously enables
one to be translated in terms of the other. Without
some connecting mechanism, such as that afforded
by brain, nerve, and muscle, the things we call intelli-
gence and will however real, wôuld be incapable of
moving the smallest particle of matter. Now, since
it is solely by moving matter that we can operate at all
in the material world, or can make ourselves known

to our fellows, —
for in the last resort speech and
writing and every action reduce themselves to muscu-
lar movement, —
and since death inhibits this power,
by breaking the link between soul and body, death
naturally stops all manifestation, interrupts all inter-
course, and so has been superficially thought to be the

annihilation of the soul.
But such a conclusion is quite unwarranted. Exist-
ence need not make itself conspicuous: things are
always difficult to discover when they make no im-
pression on the senses: the human race is hardly yet
aware, for instance, of the Ether of space and there ;
may be a multitude of other things towards whidi it

is in the same predicament.
Superficially, nothing is easier than to claim that
just aswhen the brain is the memory fails,
damaged
so when the brain is destroyed the memory ceases.
The reasoning is so plausible and obvious, so within
reach of the meanest capacity, that those who use it
against adversaries of any but the lowest intelhgence
might surely assume that it had already occurred to
them and exhibited its weak point. The weak point
in the argument is its tacit assumption that what is
non-manifest is non-existent; that smoothing out the
traces of guilt is equivalent to annihilating a crime;
and that by destroying the mechanism of interaction
between the spiritual and the material aspects of ex-
istence you must necessarily be destroying one or
other of those aspects themselves.
The brain is our present organ of thought.
Granted; but it does not follow that brain controls
and dominates thought, that inspiration is a physio-
logical process, or that every thinking creature in the
universe must possess a brain. Really we know too
littleabout the way the brain thinks^, if it can prop-
erly be said to think at all, to be able to make any such
assertion as that. We terrestrial animals are all as it
were one family, and our hereditary links with the
psychical universe consist of the physiological
mechanism called brain and nerve. But these most
interesting material structures are our servants, not
our masters; we have to train them to serve our pur-
poses; and one side of the brain is injured, the

if
other side may be trained to act instead. Destroy cer-
tain parts of the brain completely, however, and con-
nexion between the psychic and the material regions
is for us severed. True but cutting off or damaging
;
communication is not the same as destroying or dam-

aging the communicator: nor is smashing an organ
equivalent to killing the organist. When the At-
lantic cable broke, in 1858, intimate communication
between England and America was destroyed; but
that fact did not involve the destruction of either
America or England. It appears to be necessary to
emphasise this elementary matter, because the con-
trary contention is supposed to cut straight at the root
of every kind of general argument for survival hith-
erto adduced.
But after all, it may be said, the above contention
proves nothing either way; granted that breach of
communication does not mean destruction of terminal
stations, it leaves the question as to their persistence
an open one. Yes, it does; it leaves persistence to be
sustained by general arguments, such as those of the
preceding chapter, which were directed to establish-
ing the priority in essence of the spiritual to the ma-
of idea to bodily presentation; and to be sup-
terial,
ported by any kind of additional and special experi-

ence.
Argument from Telepathy

First of all, then, we must ask, are we quite sure
that the breach of intercourse is as clear and definite
and complete as had been supposed? Wehave no
glimmering conception of the process by which men-
tal activity operates on the matter of the brain so we ;
cannot be sure that its influence is limited entirely to

the brain material belonging to its own special organ-
ism. It may conceivably be able to affect other brains
too, either directly, or indirectly through an imme-
on the mind associated with them. In-
diate influence
telligent conmiunicationis normally carried on by
means of conventional mechanical movements, calcu-

lated to set up special aerial or etherial tremors;
w^hich have to be apprehended through sense organs
and brain, and interpreted back again into thought.
But we are constrained to contemplate the possibility
of a more direct method, and to ask, is there ever any
direct psychical connection between mind and mind,
irrespective of intermediate physical processes? It
is a definite though difficult question, to be answered
by experience. And an affirmative answer would

suggest, among other things, that though individual-
ity is dependent upon brain for physical manifesta-
tion, it may not be dependent on brain for psychical
existence.
Such independence is difficult to prove directly, in
a way convincing to those who approach the subject
without previous study, or with prejudices against it;
because in the proof, or to produce any recordable
impression, a bodily organ —such muscleas brain or
—must be used. We
are not, and cannot be, com-
pletely independent of the body in this earth hf e but :
we can bring forward facts which seem to indicate

an activity specially and peculiarly and psychical,

only slightly physical. Of physical modes of com-
munication between mind and mind there are many
varieties none of which do we really understand, be-
:
yond a knowledge of their physical details, though

we are well accustomed to them all but we know of ;
one which appears not to be physical, save at its ter-

minals, and which has the appearance of being, in its
mode of transmission, exclusively psychical. That is
to say, it occurs as if one mind operated directly
either on another brain or on another mind across a
distance (if distance has any meaning in such a case) ;
or as if one mind exerted its influence on another

through the conscious intervention of a third mind
acting as messenger; or as if mental intercourse were
effected unconsciously, through a general nexus of
—
communication a universal world-mind. All these
hypotheses have been suggested at different times by
the phenomenon of telepathy; and which of them is
nearest the truth it is difficult to say. There are some
who think that all are true, and that different means
are employed at different times.
What we can assert is this, that the facts of "tele-
pathy," and in a less degree of what is called "clair-
voyance," must be regarded as practically estab-
lished, in the minds of those who have studied them.
There may be, indeed there is, still much doubt about
the explanation to be attached to those facts; there is
uncertainty as to their real meaning, and as to

whether the idea half-suggested by the word "tele-
pathy" is completely correct; but the facts them-
selves are toonumerous and well authenticated to be
—
doubted, even if we except from our survey the di-
rectly experimental cases designed to test and bring
to book this strange human faculty.
Thus telepathy opens a new chapter in science, and
is of an importance that cannot be exaggerated.
Even alone, it tends mightily to strengthen the argu-

ment for transcendence of mind over body, so that
we may reasonably expect the one to be capable of
existing independently and of surviving the other;
though by itself, or in a discarnate condition, it is
presumably unable to achieve anything directly on
the physical plane. But telepathy is not all. Telep-
athy is indeed only the first link in a chain: there
are further links, further stages on the road to
scientific proof.
Arguments from Pr^ternormal Psychology

Have we no facts to go upon, only speculation,
concerning the actual persistence of individual mem-
—
ory and consciousness, of much that characterises a
personahty —apart from a bodily vehicle? Facts we
have; but they are not generally known, nor are they
universally accepted; they have still, many of them,
to run the gauntlet of scientific criticism even among
the few students who take the trouble to study them.
Their theory has been worked at pertinaciously, but
it is still in a rudimentary stage, and by the mass of
scientific men the whole subject is at present ignored,
because it seems an elusive and disappointing inquiry,
and because there are other fields which are easier of
:
cultivation and promise more immediate fertility.
The chief of the facts to which we can appeal be-

long to one of three marked regions
First, experiences connected with genius, vision,

and dream, extending up to premonition and
clairvoyance, —the specially psychological re-
gion.
Second, the singular modification of bodily faculty
—
sometimes experienced, ranging from un-
usual extention of sensory and muscular
powers, such as hyperaesthesia and what is tech-
nically known as automatism, up to various
grades of what has been described as material-
isation; — all which great group of asserted and
controverted phenomena may be said to belong
to the physiological region.
Third, the at first sight disconcerting facts con-
nected with apparent changes, dislocations and
disintegrations, of personality —what we may
call the pathological region.
Concerning all this mass of information, not only

is the theory far from distinct, but many of the facts
themselves are only sparsely known: they belong to
a special branch of study, which, conducted under
many difficulties, cannot be properly apprehended
at second hand.
Suffice it therefore to say, that wliereas it is quite
clear that manifestation of memory and conscious-
ness, in a form capable of being appreciated by or
demonstrated to us, is evidently not possible without
a

a material organism or body of some kind, yet — în
the judgment of many students of the subject —

surviving memory or personahty, even though dis-
carnate, need not be utterly and completely pre-
vented from still occasionally operating in our
sphere.
For as it was possible for what, in Chapter VIII.,
we defined as "soul" to compose and employ an organ
suited to itself, out of various kinds of nutriment,
so also appears to be possible, though not without
it
difficulty and extraordinary trouble, for a discarnate

entity or psychical unit occasionally to utilise a body
constructed by some other similar "soul," and to make
an attempt at communication and manifestation
through that. It has even been conjectured that by
special exertion of psychical power a temporary
organ of materialisation can be constructed, presum-
ably of organic particles, sufficient to enable some
interaction between spirit and matter, and even to
display some personal characteristics, through the
utilisation of a form partially separate from, though
also closely connected with, and as some think even
borrowed from, the bodily organism of the auxiliary
person known technically as the "medium" of com-
munication, whose presence is certainly necessary.
In favour of such an occurrence there is much evi-
dence, some of it of a weak kind, some of it quite
valueless; but again some of it is strong, evidenced
by weighing, and vouched for by experienced nat-
uralists and observers such as Dr. A. R. Wallace and
Sir W. Crookes, as well as by the eminent physi-
ologist Professor Richet, and by Professors Schiap-

arelli, Lombroso, and other foreign men of science.
The idea here suggested is admittedly bizarre and
at first sight absurd; neverthelesssomething of the
kind has the appearance of being true, in spite of its
having been discredited by much professional fraud
exercised upon too willing dupes. The phenomenon
on which it is based any rate a puzzling one, call-
is at
ing for further investigation: which must ultimately
pursue it into a region quite apart from and beyond
the obvious possibilities of fraud; that is to say, must
not only establish it as a fact, if it be a fact, but
must ascertain the laws which govern it.
Argument from Automatism

More frequently, however, a simpler method, akin
to telepathy and to what is commonly known as in-
spiration or "possession," is employed; whereby some
portion of the brain of "the automatist" appears to
be operated upon directly, so as to produce intelligible
statements, in speech or writing, often of consider-
able length and occasionally in unknown languages;
—these messages being, at least in the cases where
they are not merely subjective and of little interest,
apparently irrespective of the ordinary consciousness,

and only slightly sophisticated by the normal mental
activity, of the person by whom this organ is usually
wielded, and to whom it nominally "belongs."
The body, in fact, or some part of the body,
though usually controlled and directed by the par-
ticular psychical agent which has composed and
—
grown accustomed to it, can sometimes be found
capable of responding to a foreign intelligence, act-
ing either telepathically through the mind or telerg-
ically by a more direct process straight on the brain.
Sometimes the controlling intelligence belongs to a
living person, as in cases of hypnotism more usually
;
it is an influence emanating from what we must con-
sider some portion of the automatist's own larger or

subhminal self. Occasionally a person appears able
to respond to thoughts or stimuli embedded, as it
were, among psycho-physical surroundings in a man-
ner at present ill understood and almost incredible;
— as if strong emotions could be unconsciously re-
corded in matter, so that the deposit shall thereafter
affect a sufficiently sensitive organism, and cause sim-
ilar emotions to reproduce themselves in its subcon-
sciousness, in a manner analogous to the customary
conscious interpretation of photographic or phono-
graphic records, and indeed of pictures or music and
artistic embodiment generally. And lastly, there are
people who seem able to respond to a psychical agency
apparently related to the surviving portion of intelli-
gences now discarnate, in such a way as to suggest
that the said intelligences are picking up the thread
of their old thoughts, and entering into something like
their old surroundings and their old feelings
though often only in a more or less dreamy and semi-
—
entranced condition for the purpose of conveying
hallucinatory or other impressions to those who are
still in the completely embodied state.
It would be a great mistake to assume, without
proof, that any given automatic message really

emanates from the person to whom it is attributed;
and such a generalisation appUed to all so-called mes-
sages would be grotesquely untrue. But then neither
should we be safe in maintaining that none of them
have an authentic character, and that they are never
in any degree what they purport to be. The ehmina-
tion of the normal personality of the automatist, and
the proof of the supposed communicator's identity,
are singularly difficult; but in a few cases the evi-
dence for identity is remarkably strong. The sub-
stance of the message and the kind of memory dis-
played in these cases belong not at all to the brain of
the automatist, but clearly to the intelligence of the
asserted control of whose identity and special knowl-
:
edge they are sometimes strongly characteristic. As

to the elimination of normal personality, however,
it must be admitted that, in all cases, the manner and
accidents or accessories of the message are liable to

be modified by the material instrument or organ
through which the thought or idea is for our in-
formation reproduced. The reproduction of a
thought in our world appears to demand distinct ef-
fort on the part of a transcendental thinker, and it
seems to be almost a matter of indifference, or so to
speak of accident not determined by the thinker,
whether it make its appearance here in the form of
speech or of writing, or whether it take the form of a
work of art, or of unusual spiritual illumination.
This is surely true of orthodox inspiration, as well
as of what we are now conjecturing may perhaps be
an attempt at some additional method of arousing
ideas in us. Moreover, in both
1
cases, lucidity is only
to be expected, and is only obtained, in flashes. The
best of us only get flashes of genius now and then,
and the experience seldom unduly prolonged.
is
Why should we expect to be otherwise?

it
There is another aspect of the matter that may be

mentioned too. For most of the difficulty of inter-
communication we ourselves must be held responsible.
Our normal iromersion in mundane afl*airs may be
very sensible and practical, and is probably essential
to earthly progress until our civilisation is rather
more consolidated and developed, but it can hardly
facilitate communion with another order of existence.
Nor is it likely that we should be able to appreciate
the intimate concerns of that other order, even if it
were feasible to convey a detailed account of them.
It is true that messages are often vague and disap-
pointing even when apparently genuine; untrue that
they are invariably futile and useless and inappro-
priate, —such an assertion could only be made b}^ peo-
ple imperfectly acquainted with the facts. In certain
cases it is quite clear that a bodily organism has been
controlled by something other than its usual and
normal intelligence, and in a few cases the identity
of the control has been almost crucially established:
though that is a matter to be dealt with more tech-
nically elsewhere.
—
Subliminal Faculty
The extension of faculty exhibited during some
trance states has suggested that a similar enlarge-
ment of memory and consciousness may follow or ac-
company our departure from this life, and is partly
responsible for the notion of the existence of a sub-
liminal or normally unconscious portion of our total
personality. On this subject I can conveniently refer
to the summary contained in JMyers' chapters on
"Disintegrations of Personality" and on "Genius,"
in vol. i. of his Human Personality, This doctrine
the theory of a larger and permanent personality of
which the conscious self is only a fraction in process
of individualisation, the fraction being greater or less
according to the magnitude of the individual, this —
doctrine, as a Vvôrking hypothesis, illuminates many
obscure facts, and serves as a thread through an other-
wise bewildering labyrinth. It removes a number of
elementary stumbling-blocks which otherwise ob-
struct an attempt to realise vividly the incipient
stages of personal existence; it accounts for the ex-
traordinary rapidity with which the development of
an individual proceeds and it eases the theory of or-
;
dinary birth and death. It achieves all this as well as

the office for which it was originally designed,
namely, the elucidation of unusual experiences, sucli
as those associated with dreams, premonitions, and
prodigies of genius. Many great and universally
recognised thinkers, Plato, Virgil, Kant, I lliink/
1 In justification of the inclusion of this name, the following may
—

and Wordsworth, all had room for an idea more or
less of this kind; whidi indeed, in scHne form, is almost
necessitated hv a consideration of our habitually nn-
ccHiseious performance of organic function. What-
ever it is that controls our physiological medanism,
it is certainly not our own consciousness: nor is it
any part of our recognised and obvious personality.
"We fed that wie are gr-eztrT -±.2- —e knorw."
Our present state may be likened to that of the

'
hulls of ships submerge ocean among many
^
strange beasts, propeUe^ 1 m anner through

: :
space; proad peiliaps of c :::.::.: :l:-::ig many barna-

cles as decoration; only leoognising our destinaticHi
by bumping against the dock waE. With no cogni-
sance of the deck and the cabins, the spars and the
sails no thought of the sextant and the compass and
;
ihe captain no perception of the lookout on the mast,

;
of the distant horizon: no vision of objects far ahead,

I!
dangers to be avoided, destinations to be reached,
other ships to be spoken with by other means than
—
bodily contact: a region of sunshine and cloud, of
space, of perception, and of intelligence, utterly in-
accessible to the parts below the water-line.
To suppose that we know and imderstand the uni-
verse, to suppose that we hare grasped its main out-
lines, that we realise pretty completely not only what
is in it, but the still more stupendous problem of what
*For if wc siMmld see things and onrsdres as

tiny are* we would omsdtcs in a worid of a|MrilBal natues with
see
wfaieh ovir entire Teal relation nexther began at birth nor finlril with the
hodj's death." Kaxt, quoted bj HsxsraE.
is not and cannot be in it —as do some of our gnostic

(self-styled "agnostic") friends — a presumptuous
is
exercise of limited intelligence, only possible to a cer-

tain very practical and useful order of brain, which
has good solid work of a commonplace kind to do in
the world, and has been restricted in its outlook, let
us say by Providence, in order that it may do that
one thing and do it well.
And just as we fail to grasp the universe so do we
fail as yet to know ourselves: the part of which we
have become aware, the part which manifestly gov-
erns our planetary life, is probably far from being
the whole/ The assumption that the true self is com-
plex, and that a larger range of memory may ulti-
mately be attained, is justified by the researches of
alienists, and mental physicians generally, into those
curious pathological cases of "strata of memory" or
dislocations of personality, on which many medical
books and papers are available for the student. In
eases of multiple personality, the patients, when in
the ordinary or normally conscious state, are usually
ignorant of what has happened in the intervening pe-
1 Such an admission is quite consistent with recognition of the mo-
mentous character of this present stage of existence, not only while it
lasts, but as influencing, and contributing in every sense to, the future;
the doctrine of the subliminal self throws no sort of contempt or dis-
couragement on the things which really ought to interest us here and now.
There is "danger of losing sight of the ideal in our inmiediate life, and
thinking that it is to be found only in the past or in the future," says
Professor Caird; whereas our little struggle is part of the great conflict
of good and evil in the universe, and we should be encouraged were we to
"realise that our life is not an aimless or meaningless vicissitude of
events, but an essential step in the great process."
— — — ;

riodswhen they were not in that state, and are not
aware of what they have done w^hen in one of the
deeper states; but as soon as the personality has en-
tered an ultra-normal condition, it is often found to
be aware, not only of its previous actions when in

that condition, but also of what wâs felt and known
w^hile at theordinary grade of intelligence.
The analogy pointed to is that whereas we living
men and women, while associated mth this mortal or-
ganism, are ignorant of whatever experience our
larger selves may have gone through in the past
3êt when we wake out of this present materialised
condition, and enter the region of larger conscious-

ness, we may gradually realise in what a curious
though legitimate condition of ignorance we now are
and may become aware of our fuller possession, with
all that has happened here and now fully remem-
bered and incorporated as an additional experience
into the wide range of knowledge which that larger
entity must have accumulated since its intelligence
and memory began. The transition called death may
thus be an awaking rather than a sleeping it may be ;
that wê, still involved in mortal coil, are in the more

dream-like and unreal condition:
"Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep

He tl:ie dream of life
hath awakened from
'Tiswe who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife."
(Shelley's "Adonais.")
The ideas thus briefly indicated have been sug-

gested by a mass of unfamiliar experience, upon
which it is legitimate to speculate, though quite ille-
gitimate to dogmatise; but in case they seem too

fanciful to serve as any part of a basis for human
immortality, it may be well to show how clearly the
possibility of a larger and fuller existence than the

present is indicated by facts with which we are all
familiar.
Argument erom Genius

must be apparent how few of our faculties can
It
really be accounted for by the need of sustenance
and by the struggle for existence; and how those
necessary faculties and powers naturally assume an
overweening importance here and now, from the fact
that they are so specially fitted to our present sur-
roundings. So that the less immediately practical
mental and spiritual characteristics can be spoken of
by anthropologists as if they were of the nature of
sports and by-products, not in the direct line of evo-
lutional advance.
But, says Myers:
"The faculties which befit the material environment
have absolutely no primacy, unless it be of the merely
chronological kind, over those faculties which science
has often called by-products^ because they have no
manifest tendency to aid their possessor in the strug-
gle for existence in a material world. The higher
gifts of genius —poetry, the plastic arts, music, phil-
osophy, pure mathematics — all of these are precisely
as much in the central stream of evolution —are per-
ceptions of new truth and powers of new action just
as decisively predestined for the race of man —as the
aboriginal Austrahan's faculty for throwing a boom-
erang or for swarming up a tree for grubs. There
is,then, about those loftier interests nothing exotic,
nothing accidental; they are an intrinsic part of that
ever-evolving response to our surroundings which
forms not only the planetary but the cosmic history
of all our race."
We can regard these higher faculties, these inspir-
ations of genius and the hke, not only as contributing
to our best moments now, but as forecasts or indica-
tions of something still more specially appropriate to
—
our surroundings in the future anticipations of
—
worlds not realised rudiments of what will develop
more fully hereafter; so that their apparent incon-
gruousness and occasional inconvenience, under pres-
ent mundane conditions, are quite natural. Ulti-
mately they may be found to be nearer to the heart
of things than the attributes which are successful in
the stage to which this world has at present attained;
though they can only exhibit their full meaning and
attain their full development in a higher condition
—
of existence, ^whether that be found by the race on
this planet or by the individual in a life to come.
"An often-quoted analogy has here a closer appli-
cation than is commonly apprehended. The grub
comes from the egg laid by a winged insect, and a
winged insect it must itself become but meantime it
;
must for the sake of its own nurture and preserva-

tion acquire certain larval characters —characters
sometimes so complex that the observer may be ex-

cused for mistaking that larva for a perfect insect
destined for no further change save death. Such
larval characters acquired to meet the risks of a tem-
porary environment, I seem to see in man's earthly
strength and glory. In these I see the human ana-
logues of the poisonous tufts which choke the captor
—the attitudes of mimicry which suggest an absent
sting—the head' coloration which disconcerts
^death's
a stronger foe."
For the triumphs of natural selection, then, we
must look not to the spiritual faculties and endow-
ments of the race, but to the businesslike masterful-
ness which makes one man a conqueror and another
a millionaire. These we can regard as larval charac-
ters, of special service in the present stage of exist-
ence, but destined to be discarded, or modified almost
out of recognition, in proportion as a higher state is
attained. This I take to be the deep meaning of the

Gospel sentence beginning "How hardly!"
But to continue Myers' biological parable:
"Meantime the adaptation to aerial life is going
on; something of the imago or perfect insect is per-
formed within the grub; and in some species, even
before they sink into their transitional slumber the
rudiments of wings still helpless protrude awkwardly
beneath the larval skin. Those who call Shelley, for
instance, *a beautiful but ineffectual angel beating
his wings in the void,' may adopt, if they choose, this
homelier but exacter parallel. Shelley's special gifts
.

were no more by-products of Shelley's digestive sys-
tem than the wings are by-products of the grub"
(flyers, i. p. 97)
The meaning,, you see, is that they are in the direct
Ime of evolution, when the whole of existence is taken
into accomit; and that similarly in the evolution of
genius we are watcliing the emergence of unguessed
potentiahties from the primal germ, —the fii'st reveal-
ings
"Of faculties, displayed in vain, but born
To prosper in some better sphere."
(BEow>n>-G'5 '"Paracelsus.")
^loreover, what is true for the indi^-idual must be

true also in some measiu-e for the race. Embryology
teaches us that each organism rapidly recapitulates
or epitomises, amid how different conditions, its an-
cestral past liistory. It is legitimate to extend the
same idea to the future, and to regard the progress
of the individual and the progress of the race as in
some degree concurrent; since their potentiahties are
similar, though their surroundings will be different.
This argument, so far as I know, is novel, but not
undeser^-ing of attention.
Aegl'mext feom ]Mextal Pathology

And as to the disintegrations of personaht}', —the
painful defects of will, memory, the
the lapses of
losses of sensation — such by the
as are manifested
hysteric patients of the Salpetriere and other hos-
pitals, —
the lesson to be learnt from those patholog-
ical cases is not one of despair at the weaknesses and
II
ghastly imperfections possible to humanity; rather,

on one of hope and inspiration. For
this view, it is
they point to the possibility that our present condi-
tion may be as much below an attainable standard as
the condition of these poor patients is below what by
a natural convention we have agreed to regard as the
"normal" state. We
might indeed feel bound to re-
gard it not only as normal but as ultimate, were it not
that some specimens of our race have already tran-
scended it, have shown that genius, almost super-
human, is possible to man, and have thereby fore-
shadowed the existence of a larger personality for
—
us all. Nay, they have done more, for in thus real-
ising in the flesh some of the less accessible of human
attributes, they have become the first-fruits of a
brotherhood higher than the human; we may hail
them as the forerunners of a nobler race. Such a
race, I venture to predict, will yet come into exist-
ence, not only in the vista of what may seem to some
of us an unattractive and unsubstantial future, but
here in the sunshine on this planet Earth.
"Prognostics told
Man's near approach; so in man's self arise
August anticipations, symbols, types
Of a dim splendour ever on before."
For as the hysteric stands in comparison with us

ordinary men, so perhaps do we ordinary men stand
in comiârison with a not impossible ideal of faculty
and of self-control. "Might not," says JNIyers, "all
the historic tale be told, miitato nomine, of the Avhole
race of mortal men? What assurance have we that
from some point of higher vision we men are not as
these shrunken and shadowed souls? Suppose that
we had all been a community of hysterics, all of us
together subject to these shifting losses of sensation,
these inexphcable gaps of memory, these sudden de-
fects and paralyses of movement and of will. As-
suredly we should soon have argued that our actual
powers were all with which the human organism was
or could be endowed. Nay, if we had been a
. . .
populace of hysterics we should have acquiesced in

our hysteria. We should have pushed aside as a fan-
tastic enthusiast the fellow-sufferer who strove to tell
us that this was not all thatwe were meant to be. As
we now stand, —each one of us totus^ teres, atque
—
rotundus in his own esteem, we see at least how
cowardly would have been that contentment, how vast
the ignored possibilities, the forgotten hope. Yet
who assures us that even here and now we have de-
veloped into the full height and scope of our being?
A moment comes when the most beclouded of these
hysterics has a glimpse of the truth. A
moment
comes when, after a profound slumber, she wakes
—
into an instant clair a flash of full perception, which
shows her as solid, vivid realities all that she has in
her bewilderment been apprehending phantasmally as
a dream. ... Is there for us also any possibility of
a like resurrection into reality and day? Is there for
us any sleep so deep that waking from it after the
likeness of perfect man we shall be satisfied; and
shall see face to face and shall know even as also we
;
are known?"
—
Whatever may be the answer to this question, it is

—
undoubtedly true now and that it is true is largely
—
owing to him and his co-workers that "these dis-
turbances of personaUty are no longer for us as —
—
they were even for the last generation ^mere empty
marvels, which the old-fashioned sceptic would often
plume himself on refusing to beUeve. On the con-
trary, they are beginning to be recognised as psycho-
pathological problems of the utmost interest; —no
one of them exactly like another, and no one of them
without some possible apercu into the intimate struc-
ture of man."
Religious Objections
Whatever objections to the above argument may
—
be adduced from the side of science and there are
sure to be many, for free criticism is its natural at-
—
mosphere, there is one from the side of religion
more often felt than expressed perhaps which I—
must in conclusion briefly notice:
Objection is sometimes taken against any attempt
being made gradually to arrive at what in process of
time may come to be regarded as a scientific proof
of such a thing as immortality; on the ground that
it is an encroachment on the region of faith, a pre-
sumptuous interference with what ought to be

treated as the territory of religion alone.
To meet these objectors on their own ground, they
might be reminded of such texts as 2 Pet. i. 5, Prov.
XXV. 2, as well as of the still more authoritative en-
couragement to investigation contained in Luke xi.
—

9 and in 1 John i. 5 the latter, or indeed both, being
;
an expression of the basal postulate of the man of

n
science, namely, the ultimate intelligibility of the Uni-
verse.
But, after all, an objection of this kind can only be
by those who think that knowledge is the
felt, first
enemy of belief, instead of its strengthener and sup-

porter, and second by those who unconsciously fear
that the domain of religion is finite, and who there-
fore resent encroachments as diminishing its already
too restricted area. by people who
It cannot be felt
realise that the dominion of religion is unlimited, and
that there is infinite scope for faith, however far
—
knowledge real and accurate scientific knowledge
extends its boundaries. The enlargement of those
boundaries is all gain; for thus the one area is in-
creased while the other is not diminished. Infinity
cannot be diminished by subtraction. No such ob-
jection to the spread of knowledge was felt by that
inspired writer who hoped for the time when "the
earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as
the waters cover the sea."
Whatever science can establish, that it has a right
to establish : more than a right, it has a duty. What-
ever science can examine into, that it has a right to
examine If there be things which we are not
into.
intended to know, be assured that we shall never
know them: we shall not know enough about them
even to ask a question or start an inquiry. The in-
tention of the universe is not going to be frustrated
by the insignificant efforts of its own creatures. If
we refrain from examination and no bet-

inquiry, for
ter reason than the fanciful notion that perhaps we
may be trespassing* on forbidden ground, such hesi-
tation argues a pitiful lack of faith in the goodwill
and friendliness and power of the forces that make
for righteousness.
Let us study all the facts that are open to us, with
a trusting and an open mind; with care and candour
testing all our provisional hypotheses, and with slow
and cautious making good our steps as
verification
we proceed. Thus may we hope to reach out farther
and ever farther into the unknown; sure that as we
grope in the darkness we shall encounter no clammy
horror, but shall receive an assistance and sympathy
which it is legitimate to symbolise as a clasp from the
hand of Christ himself.
SECTION IV— SCIENCE AND CHRIS
TIANITY
19s
CHAPTER X
SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS THE RE-INTERPRETATION
OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
NOW that religion is becoming so much more

is being born again in the spirit of modern criti-
real,
cism and scientific knowledge, may it not be well to

ask whether the formal statement of some of the doc-
trines which we have inherited from mediseval and
still earlier times cannot be wisely and inoffensively
modified? There is usually some sort of forced sense

in which almost any statement can be judged to have
in it an element of truth, especially a statement which
embodies the beliefs of many generations. But
when the element of truth is quite other than had been
supposed, and when the original statement has to be
tortured in order to display it, it may be time to con-
sider whether without harm its mode of expression
—
can be reconsidered and redrafted, to the ultimate
benefit indeed of that religion of truth and clearness
which we all seek to attain.
No doubt the crudity of popular statements of doc-
trine is recognised by many modern theologians and
experts, who have travelled far beyond the original
intention and superficial interpretation of their
creeds and formularies; and these may be ready and
anxious for revision, although their responsible ut-
197
198 SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY
terances on fundamental subjects are duly restrained

and cautious, lest they offend the ignorant whose
minds are not yet ripe. In that case it may be per-
missible for laymen to show that they at least are
—
ready for a doctrinal revision a kind of stocktaking
such as is necessary from time to time in all living
and expanding subjects, and is especially necessary
now after a century of notable advance in natural
knowledge.
It may be objected that revision of religious for-
mulae is no concern of mine and there is force in the
;
retort. I find that I have said below that harm is

liable to dog the footsteps of a well-meaning fanatic
or a blatant fool. Possibly it is in something akin
to the spirit of the fanatic that I take the risk of en-
tering upon what may prove a thorny path, though
I earnestly trust that very little pain to others need
accrue from any errors of mine.
Consider, then, the doctrine of the Atonement, and

let us ask whether the expression of that doctrine
traditionally and officially held or supposed to be held
by the churches to-day is satisfactory.
In days when the vicariousness of sin could be ac-
cepted, and when an original fall of Adam could be
held as imputed to the race, it was natural to admit
the possibility of a vicarious punishment and to ac-
cept an imputed righteousness. In the days when
God could be thought of as an angry Jehovah who
sent pestilences until He was propitiated by the smell
of a burnt-offering, it was possible to imagine that
a
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 199
the just anger of an offended God could be met by

the sacrifice of an innocent victim.
The of man and the redemption by blood there-
fall
fore in a measure go together, and may be said to
constitute the backbone of Evangelical Christianity,
which in some of its crude and revivalistic forms
always lays great stress upon blood and its potent re-
deeming efficacy.
But all this is much older than Christianity; and it
is clarifying to realise how these strange doctrines,

preached even at this day, represent a survival of re-
ligious beliefs held five or six centuries before the
Christian era.
In those admirable translations of Euripides with
which Professor Gilbert Murray has delighted the
heart not only of scholars but of at least one student
of science, we find in his notes on The Bacchce the fol-
lowing passages:
"A curiousrelic of primitive superstition and
cruelty remained firmly embedded in Orphism —
doctrine irrational and unintelligible, and for that
very reason wrapped in the deepest and most sacred
mystery: a belief in the sacrifice of Dionysus him-
self, and the purification of man by his blood.
seems possible that the savage Thracians, in
*'It
the fury of their worship on the mountains, when

they were possessed by the god and became Svild
beasts,' actually tore with their teeth and hands any
hares, goats, fawns, or the like that they came across.
There survives a constant tradition of inspired Bac-
chanals in their miraculous strength tearing even bulls
asunder —a feat, happily, beyond the bounds of hu-

man possibility. The wild beast that tore was, of
course, the savage god himself. And by one of these
curious confusions of thought, which seem so incon-
ceivable to us and so absolutely natural and obvious
to primitive men, the beast torn was also the god!
The Orphic congregations of later times, in their
most holy gatherings, solemnly partook of the blood
of a bull, which was, by a mystery, the blood of
Dionysus Zagreus himself, the 'Bull of God,' slain
in sacrifice for the purification of man.
"It is noteworthy, and throws much light on the

spirit of Orphism, that, apart from this sacramental
tasting of the blood, the Orphic worshipper held it an
abomination to eat the flesh of animals at all. ... It
fascinated him just because it was so incredibly primi-
tive and uncanny; because it was a mystery which
transcended reason!"^
Professor Murray seems to think it hard for a
modern to contemplate the victim and the priest as
in any sense one person, but orthodox religious people
will experience no difficulty, as is evidenced by the
line they are accustomed to sing:
"Himself the Victim and Himself the Priest,"
which, must be admitted, forms a curious parallel;

it
though the meaning is simple and legitimate enough,

1 Mr. L. P. Jacks has called my attention to an interesting article on a
similar subject, by Dr. Farnell, in the Hibbert Journal.
: : :
namely, that the sacrifice is voluntary: else, indeed

were it mere execution. But a few strange hymns
are more worthy of the worship of Dionysus, at least
in some of its older and more primitive and purer
forms, than of a place in a church-service (A. & M.)
collection of to-day. These hymns emphasise, for
the edification of the laity, themore barbarous con-
comitants of sacrificial and vicarious redemption, by
blood drawn from and pain inflicted on an innocent
victim who is likewise a god.
Sometimes the blood is represented as being used
for cleansing purposes
"Oh, wash me in Thy precious blood."
Sometimes it is described as a vivifying draught
"May those precious fountains

Drink to thirsty souls afford;"
but pagan precedents are closely followed, and pagan

survival is clear.
The idea of sacrificial suffering judicially self-

inflicted by a widely vengeful Deity is an essential
element in popular theology
"He, Who once in righteous vengeance

Whelmed the world beneath the flood.
Once again in mercy cleansed it
With His own most precious Blood,
Coming from His throne on high
On the painful Cross to die.
"We were sinners doomed to die;

Jesus paid the penalty."
It is more like a legal fiction or commercial transac-

tion than a natural process.
"Scourged with unrelenting fury

For the sins which we deplore.
By His livid stripes He heals us.
Raising us to fall no more."
"Had Jesus never bled and died,

Then what could thee and all betide
But uttermost damnation?"
This sort of crude materialism naturally leads to a

kind of idolatry:
"Faithful Cross, above all other.

One and only noble Tree,
None in foliage, none in blossom.
None in fruit thy peer may be;
Sweetest wood, and sweetest iron;
Sweetest weight is hung on thee.
"Thou alone wast counted worthy

This world's ransom to sustain.
That a shipwrecked race for ever
Might a port of refuge gain,
With the sacred Blood anointed
Of the Lamb for sinners slain."
Suppose, however, that the belief in the efficacy

of sacrifice is old, and that our form of it has a long
ancestry which may be traced: that need not under-
mine its essential truth; it will only mean that hu-
manity had glimpses of truth earlier than the full
revelation, and the familiar doctrine of "types" will
be appealed to.
In certain beliefs, such as that of immortality, I

should myself allow the argument to have weight,
;
and should not be unwilling to appeal to the antiquity

of human tradition as tending in favour of some sort
of truth underlying this perennial and protean faith
and so in the matter of vicarious punishment and
bloody atonement by an innocent victim or by an in-
carnate god for the sins of humanity, if we could
feel a real and helpful truth underlying it, we might
admit that the antiquity of the tradition was even in
its favour. But
cannot be that all religious creeds,
it
without exception, which are inherited from barbar-

ous times have a true ethical significance: some of
them must surely be mistaken, and it becomes a ques-
tion which of them we may retain and which we must
gradually emancipate ourselves from. I
seek to
would not be in the least dogmatic in such a matter,
but surely it is generally recognised that although the
sufferings and violent death of Christ were natural
consequences of His birth so far in advance of His
age, and although the pity and terror of such a
ghastly tragedy has a purifying and sacramental in-
fluence, yet we are now unable to detect in it anything
of the nature of punishment; nor do we imagine for a
moment that an angry God was appeased by it, and
is consequently disposed to treat more lightly the sins
of men here and now, or any otherwise than as they

have always been treated by a constant, steadfast, per-
severing Universe.
Nor can we suppose that leaders of theologic
thought are able to derive satisfaction from the more
modern doctrine (perhaps, for all I know, a heresy)
that it was not so much an infinite punishment as an
infinite repentance that was efficacious; so that, ade-

quate repentance having been achieved once for all
long ago, sinners have nothing further to do but to
believe and acquiesce in it.
As a matter of fact, the higher man of to-day is
not worrying about his sins at all, still less about their
punishment. His mission, if he is good for anything,
is to be up and doing,^ and in so far as he acts
wrongly or unwisely he expects to suffer. He may
unconsciously plead for mitigation on the ground of
good intentions,^ but never either consciously or un-
consciously will anyone but a cur ask for the punish-
ment to fall on someone else, nor rejoice if told that
it already has so fallen.
As for "original sin" or "birth sin" or other notion
of that kind, by which is partly meant the sin of his
parents, —that sits asbolutely lightly on him. As a
matter of fact it is non-existent, and no one but a
monk could have invented it. Whatever it be it is
not a business for which we are responsible. did We
not make the world and an attempt to punish us for
;
our animal origin and ancestry would be simply

comic, if anyone could be found who was willing to
take it seriously.
Here we are; we haveour bodies, from
risen, as to
the beasts as a race the struggle has been severe, and
;
there have been both rises and falls. have been We

helped now and again by bright and shining indi-
—
vidual examples true incarnations of diviner spirits
1 Matt. xxiv. 46, xii. 43. 2 Matt xxv. 25.

than our own, —notably

by one supremely bright
Spirit who blazed out nineteen hundred years ago,
and was speedily murdered by the representatives of
that class whose mission it appears to be to wage war
against the prophets, and to do their wôrst to exter-
minate new ideas and kinds of goodness to which they
are not accustomed. Fortunately for the race, they
are only able to body the soul, the inspiration,
kill the ;
the germ of a new and higher faith, seems for ever

beyond their grasp.
But now that orthodox people enthusiastically
recognise his supreme goodness, they take steps to
deny that he was eiFectively man, —only half man
say some, only quarter man say others:^ human only
on one side they feel he must have been, else he could
not have been so good, so wise, so patient. So the
hope of a higher humanity is to be taken from us, in
order that man's sins may be superhumanly atoned for
and an angry God illogically appeased.
Well, well! demi-gods were common enough in
those days. And again it may be said that the anti-
quity of the belief is to its credit, and that these tales
of the gods were but crude heraldings of a divine
^
truth some day to be made clear.

But why, why, what is the good of it? Can a di-
vine spirit not enter into a man born of two parents?
Is divine inspiration to be limited to a being of ex-
1 This is a reference to the doctrine concerninp; the supposed origin

of the Virfîn.
2 Familiar to the Jews during their Babylonian captivity and the
Roman conquest.
ceptional parentage? If we grant that it is a physi-

ological condition towards or at which the race should
aim, — if we suppose that some day we shall have
one parent only, and that that is to be our apotheosis,
—there would be meaning in it. In that case Christ
would indeed be the first-fruits, and would repre-
sent some unlaiown possibility in our physical na-
ture. But do people think that? And if not,
what is the virtue of semi-parentage? If for a Di-
vine Incarnation we admit human parentage at all,
we may as well admit it altogether. If a taint is

conveyed by inheritance from or dependence on hu-
—
man flesh grossly built up by daily food of terres-
trial materials and grossly cleared of refuse that —
taint appertains not to fatherhood only, but to mother-
hood also; and the only way to avoid the imaginary
stain is to postulate a being sprung like Pallas from
—
the brain of Zeus a pure embodiment of thought, a
true psychological "conception." That Christ pos-
sessed a divine spirit in excess, to an extent unknown
to us —
that he was an embodiment of truly Divine
attributes,^ which as thus revealed we worship may —
be willingly admitted; that he represents a standard
or peak towards which humanity may try to aim, is a
tenable and helpful creed; but that his body was ab-
normally produced, even if it be the fact, seems to
give no assistance. I derive no sort of comfort or
intellectual aid from an idea of that kind.
For what is virgin birth? merely a case of par-
1 John xvi. 28, xvii. 4.

thenogenesis. It has been asserted perhaps errone-

ously, that X-rays have the power to produce parthe-
nogenetie development in some lowly kinds of ova/
It is doubtless thinkable enough. I would not say it
is impossible, but that it is ethically useless. The
lowest organisms multiply by fission, sexual reproduc-
tioncomes in later as an improved form but it comes ;
in very —
low down as low down as the higher plants
— and exists throughout the main animal kingdom.
Possibly at some other stage, or by some other pro-
cess, it may be dispensed with. If so, it will be a bi-
ological fact of scientific interest, and, if ever applic-
able to man, a development of astounding social sig-
nificance, but nothing more. There is no virtue in
multiplication by fission, any more than there is
vice in multiplication by sex. Both are superla-
tively interesting facts, like many other facts of
science, and no one can say that we understand the
extraordinary truth that a gentle warmth applied for
a certain time to a sparrow's egg will result in a live
creature breaking forth, which had not existed before,
endowed with power and feel and grow and
to live
propagate his kind to the third and fourth thousandth
generation. —
For some reason a wise and good
social reason —
mankind, living in a crowded state, has
surrounded the multiplication process with ritual and
emotion and fear. No doubt this is absolutely justi-
fiable and right, and, by experience, necessary but it ;
may in some cases have gone too far; and it seems to

^British Medical Journal, 13th February 1904, p. 383.
—
208 SCIEXCE AND CHRISTIANITY
me to go too far when it denies that a divine spirit

can enter into any body except one that has been pro-
duced in an exceptional way. Whatever the mys-
terious plirase "Son of God" means, and it probably
means sometliing mighty and true, it cannot mean
that. A
behef in that is materiahsm run rampant.
And yet even materiahsm need not be a term of
abuse for if matter be the li^îng garment of God,
;
as it certainly is the temporary raiment of man, and —

if the Divine Spirit be immanent in ever}i:hing that
exists, I do not say that a glorified materiahsm may
not enshrme some elements of truth, when properly
understood; nor would I seek to deny the benefit of
Sacraments, in spite of their curiously material char-
acter. But the vicarious expiation, the judicial pun-
ishment of the innocent, and the appeasement of an
angry God, are surely now recognisable as savage in-
ventions though they have left then* traces on surviv-
;
ing formulae, which accordingly have to be explained

away. And so hke'\^dse the superior virtue of a one-
sided human origin, for any Redeemer or Exemplar
of mankind, seems to me unworthy of a period of
spiritual awakening, of a cleansing acceptance of the
facts of nature, of a purification of the material uni-
verse by the recognised permeance of an immanent
energising God, of whom we too are fragmentary,
strugghng, helpful portions.
II
"UTiat, then, are the Truths underWng the great
I
mysteries connected with the appearance and work
;
of Christ? Here I approach the positive part of my

task, entering a region already flooded with literature
yet must I not shrink from an attempt to supplement
negative criticism by such provisional and tentative
positive judgment as I have been able to form, from
the scientific point of view —the only kind of judg-
ment to which I am entitled, —concerning the under-
Ijing Realities. No justification
of this course
should be necessary, because a fine jewel only flashes
the brighter when turned about so as to expose every
facet to the light; so I proceed without hesitation,
though as briefly as is consistent with intelhgibility,
to set them down:
1. Incarnation with Pre-existence.
2. Revelation or Discovery.
3. Continuity and persistent Influence.
The utterance of science on these heads is not loud
and is not positive, but I claim that at least it is not
negative. No science asserts that our personality will
cease a quarter of a century hence, nor does any
science assert that it began half a century ago.
Spiritual existence "before all worlds" is a legitimate
creed.
No science maintains that the whole of our person-
ality is incarnate here and now : it is in fact beginning
to surmise the contrary,and to suspect the existence
of a larger transcendental individuality, with which
men of genius are in touch more than ordinary men.
We may be all partial incarnations of a larger
self. Incarnation of a portion of a divine spirit
therefore involves no scientific dislocation or contra-
diction,nor need it involve any material mechanism

other than that to wliich we are accustomed/ For
only the germ is derived from others; the body is
built under the guidance of the indweUing, li^dng,

personal entity it is adapted to and serves to display
:
the features of that entity under the limitations and

disabilities of a material aspect; as the epiphany of
an artist's conception is restrained by the limitations
of his medium, as well as bv his lack of executive skill.
Granting, then, the advent of as lofty a Spirit as
—
we can conceive, perfectly hmnan on the bodily side,
^îth all that that implies, and perfectly Di^dne on the
spiritual side, whatever that may mean, what sort —
of result may be expected to follow?
Consider the position. Here is mankind, risen
from the beasts, making gods in the likeness of its
ancestors, —
in something worse than its own hkeness,
— cruel, jealous, bloody gods, who order massacres
of helpless non-combatants and cattle, the courts of
whose temples and tabernacles are a shambles served
by a greedy self-seeking priesthood and by profess-
ional rehgious people who play to a gallery.^ Into
such a world, that is to say, a world with these general
characteristics, in spite of occasional bursts of bright-
ness and much homely virtue, imagine the thorough
incarnation of a truly Di\4ne Spirit, and what would
be the consequences?
The immediate consequences we know. On the
part of the priests hostility and murder; on the part
1 John i. 13-14; 1 John iii. 3.
2 Matt, xxiii. 5.
of peasantry, curiosity growing into sympathy on the ;
part of a few earnest souls love and adoration. But

what in the long-run would be the permanent conse-
quences? Surely a discovery of the truer nature of
God: one of the veils would be drawn aside from the
face of Deity, and there would partially emerge, not
Jehovah any more than Baal, but a Being whom it
was possible to love, to serve, to worship for whom it ;
is possible to live and work, and, if need be, die.
There would be the beginnings of a real at-one-ment

between man and God.^
Observe that the influence exerted is exerted w^holly
on man. The attitude of God has changed no whit;
there never was any hostility to be washed out in
blood; He had felt no stupid wrath at the blind ef-
forts, the risings and sinkings of men struggling in
the mire from bestial to human attributes; there was
nothing to appease. But there was plenty to reveal:
an infinitude of compassion, an ideal of righteousness,
the inevitableness of law, the hopelessness of rebel-
lion,^ the power of faith, the quenching of supersti-
tious fear in filial love a real
; and not a mechanical sal-
vation, no legal quibble but a deep eternal truth. Let
man but see the face of God, so far as it can be re-
vealed in the flesh, and he will catch a glimpse of a
Holy of Holies such as he had not conceived. The
savage inventions of a jealous God who resents the
worship of anything but himself, who thinks more of
his own glory and dignity than of the creative work
1 John xiv. 7; Mark xv. 38. 2 John xvi. 8.
——
of evolution, who arranges that if people do not theor-

ise correctly here and now then they shall suiFer eter-
—
nal pain all these ignorances fall into the region of
blasphemous fables, henceforth to be promulgated
by fanatics alone.
And yet let us be fair. The worship of Jehovah
was based on a recognition of the majesty and sa-
credness of Law; an element nevermore to be de-
stroyed. And as to punishment for wrong belief,
the notion of an eternal penalty attaching to discord-
ance or dislocation between ourselves and the Universe
of which we are a part is a true and luminous idea.
When our beliefs are out of harmony with facts, when
our theories are false, we are liable to act erroneously,
and accordingly to suffer by conflict with inevitable
law, even though we act in accordance with our faith,
and so are not consciously wicked or infidel. The
connexion between true theory and right action is real
and close, although very hkely the commonest faults
of men are due less to wrong notions than to weak
wills; but the sins due to wrong theory are liable to
be much more really deadly^; there is no wickedness
so violent as that organised by the fanatic who thinks
he is doing God service, nor is there any harm worse
than can follow the footsteps of a well-meaning bla-

tant fool. And the penalty is in a sense eternal, that
is to say aeonic,^ for it is incurable except by mental
1 Matt, xxiii. 30, 34.
There seems to be a popular idea abroad that the derivation of the

2
—
word eternal signifies without end I suppose from e and terminus
and that the word aeonic is milder. But in truth they mean just the
same; only one is the Latin and the other the Greek form. The sup-
posed popular derivation is a false one.
and So long as wrong beliefs

spiritual revolution.
continue, so long there must be a sense of dislocation,
a feeling of friction and of grit: the only remedy is
to get right with the Universe. The sin and the dam-
nation are co-eternal or co-seonal.
The law thus stated is no theologic dogma, it re-
from no arbitrary
sults fiat, it is the conmionplace ex-
pression of a natural fact. It is exemplified in the
running of every piece of human machinery, and in
the working of our own bodies. Anything out of
gear is a source of disquiet, of inefficiency, and of
pain; health and happiness result from a restoration
of harmonv.
How the grit got into the cosmic organism may be
a hard question; perhaps it has never yet been out.
This may be a narrow, temporal way of conceiving
—
the matter but let it pass for the present. Anyhow
we could not have become what we are without it;
and the word "grit" has acquired a forcible psychic
connotation. After all, grit is only matter out of
place it has no intrinsic or absolute quality. Whether
;
it exists for good or for ill, we did not put it there;
though it is our privilege to help to remove it. We

are the artisans of creation, at least in this outlying
planetary district, and a magnificent co-operation is
our highest privilege.^

Almost every widespread doctrine has a meaning
and enshrines a truth, visible when freed from its
blasphemous accretions; and the doctrine of asonic
iJohn V. 17.
;
damnation, even as too specifically interpreted by

Athanasius,is a glimpse of the truth that whosoever
joy of the Lord must endeavour to

will enter into the
understand rightly the cosmic scheme/ and that ex-
cept a man get into harmony with Truth and Reality
he cannot ascend to the destiny in store for him He —
cannot be "saved."
In the same way a germ of truth can be detected in
that persistent element of popular theology, the idea
of There must be
sacrificial suffering, self-inflicted.
such a germ, else the belief could not have proved

itself of such ''saving" power; —
and even the current
crudities of expression may have had their use, in the
recent transitional age of the earth's history ^the geo- —
logical epoch during which the evolution of man has
—
been beginning that uneducated age out of which
wê cannot yet be said to have emerged. The essence
of truth contained in it would appear to be that the
responsible task of evolution from animal to higher
man, the struggle humanam condere gentem, could
not be undertaken and carried through even by Deity
without grievous suffering and agonising patience ^
and this sympathetic shudder through the whole of
Existence might well be parabolically expressed in
terms of current altruistic sacrificial legend. Subject
to proper interpretation, the legend has a meaning:
the mistake lay in imagining it an expiatory transac-
tion, instead of a natural and necessary process, quite

unlike the alternate moods of fury and affection some-
times exhibited by a chief to slaves.
1 Matt. xxii. 11. 2 Rom. viii. 22.
It was not a hare necessary and natural process,

however; the aspects of Deity are so infinite that they
cannot be grasped simultaneously. The personal as-
pect is as vivid as any of the others^ and, from this
point of view, the genuineness of Divine suffering,
no matter how inevitable,^ has always been recognised
as a revelation of Divine and Fatherly love.
The redeeming and elevating efficacy of such a
conviction is manifest. The perception of something
in the Universe which not only makes for righteous-
ness, but which loves and sympathises in the process;
and yet no mere indiscriminate charity, weakly re-
is
lieving man from

the consequences of his blunders or
stealthily undermining his powers of self-help, but
a true benevolence, which healthily and strongly and
if need be sternly convinces him that the path of duty
is the path of joy,^ that sacrifice and not selfishness
is the road to the heights of existence,^ that it is far
better to suffer wrong than to do wrong :^ such a per- —

ception inevitably raises man far above "the yelp of
the beast," "saves" him, saves him truly, from seons
of degradation, and enables him to "stand on the
heights of his life with a glimpse of a height that is
higher."
Selfishness long continued must lead to isolation
and so to a sort of practical extinction:^ it is like a
1 See Chapter II. § iv. above.
2 Luke XV. 4.
8 Matt. XXV. 21, 30.
*Matt. xvi. 25; John xii. 32.
B Plato, Goryias 409, conversation with Polus; and elsewhere.
Cecilia de Noel, by Lanoe Falconer.
disintegrating or repulsive force in the material

cosmos, while love is like a cohesive and constructive
force. All this is no new doctrine, thank goodness it !
has been preached and practised by the prophets and

saints of the human race for generations —by some
mighty ones even before the advent of Jesus of Naz-
areth. For that love is the quickening force of the
and that its fruition would lead to
spiritual universe,
super-humanity, had been clearly stated before it was
in the Fourth Gospel supremely emphasised; and the
words put by the Socrates of Plato into the mouth
of Diotima the prophetess of Mantineia ^ have a deep
and growing meaning for those who have ears to
hear.
A discovery once made by the human race is perma-
nent: it fades no more, and its influence grows from

age to age. We are now beginning to realise a fur-
ther stage in the process of atonement; we are rising
to the conviction that we are a part of nature, and so
a part of God ; that the whole creation — the One and
the Many and
All-One is travailing together —
towards some great end and that now, after ages of
;
development, we have at length become conscious por-

tions of the great scheme, and can co-operate in it
with knowledge and with joy. We are no aliens in a
stranger universe governed by an outside God we are ;
parts of a developing whole, all enfolded in an em-

bracing and interpenetrating love, of which we too,
each to other, sometimes experience the joy too deep
1 Symposium, 191-212. Best translation in Myers' Human Personality,
vol. i. p. 113.
for words. And this strengthening vision, this sense

of union with Divinity, this, and not anything artifi-
cial or legal or commercial, is what science will some
day tell us is the inner meaning of the Redemption of
Man.
CHAPTER XI
SIN, SUFFERING AND WRATH
the last chapter certain great topics were dealt

INwith so briefly that if left without amplification
they may give rise to misunderstanding; indeed their
treatment has already aroused some criticism, notably
an extremely friendly comment by Dr. Talbot, now
Bishop of Southwark, published in the Hihbert Jour-
nalj wherein, while criticising judicially, he neverthe-
less hand of v/elcome.
holds out a
This article was replied to sufficiently in the suc-
ceeding number of the Hihbert Journal, and not
much of my reply need be here reproduced.
I will only say that whereas in the greater part of
the present book, and indeed of my writings gener-
ally, the mode of treatment aims at being positive
rather than negative-r-seeking to construct rather
than to destroy, and hoping to replace error quietly
—
by substitution of truth ^the last chapter does
tosome extent take a negative or destructive attitude
and accordingly demands extremely careful treat-
ment.
I do not conceive of myself, however, as attacking
Theology or Theological doctrine: I discern an ele-
ment of truth in nearly every doctrine, perhaps in
quite every doctrine which the human race has been
218
SIN, SUFFERING AND WRATH 219
able to believe for a long period but I ; am seeking to

scrutinise more closely, and if possible display to
greater advantage, that side of those doctrines which
faces us across the frontier of our scientific territory.
This side has been less efficiently attended to by the
builders than the facade devoted to edification; and
some or our own outworks approach so near to the
Theological position on its more prosaic side, that an
occasional raid, inspired by admiration and conducted
with reverence, may be pardoned.
It looks to me as if part of the building were need-
lessly obscured by coatings and stucco and excres-
cences, once thought ornamental. Perhaps this ex-
traneous matter had the useful effect of protecting
the building through times of ignorance and violence,
but some of it is now seen to be little better than dis-
figurement and crudity, hiding the beautiful structure
beneath; it was this extraneous matter alone that I
intended to attack in my last chapter.
But in this legitimate restoration work at the pres-
ent day a number of operatives are engaged; some
doing their occasional best from outside, like myself,
others, as regular workmen acting from within, like
Dr. Talbot. With his scheme of the structure, as
seen from his point of view and stated in the Hib-
bert JournalJ I have extremely little cause to dis-
agree. He is
one of the many whom I referred to as
having already emancipated themselves from errors
of the past to a large extent; and if it still seems to
me that here and there in his statement traces of
crudencss remain, who am I that I should suppose
myself capable of infallibly detecting and evaluating

all forms of crudity?
I notice that Professor Masterman admits the

crudity of ordinary statements of Christian doctrine,
but justifies it as necessary to catch the attention of
ignorant laymen, who are accustomed to speak in
terms of "blood." I think it possible for the clergy
to over-estimate the crudity and ignorance of the
laity. Aprofessional jargon is apt to be employed
which by habit may sound appropriate on Sundays,
but does not represent the mental attitude of anyone
at other times. Perhaps spirit and character once re-
sided in the blood, as compassion in the bowels, viru-
lence in the spleen, love in the heart, and other emo-
tions in other viscera, but few persons imagine that
they live there now. I say nothing against the meth-
ods of the Salvation Army in its own sphere of ac-
tivity: these may be justified by their results. I
somewhat doubt whether ordinary Church procedure
is so justified.
it is not wise to assume too invinci-,
I suggest that
ble an ignorance on the part of habitual worshippers.
It may, for instance, be of doubtful wisdom to with-
draw documents from common use on this ground
alone, and at the same time to suggest that neverthe-
less they convey essential truth to clerics instructed
in refinements of interpretation; it is rather too sug-
gestive of the attitude of the priests in John vii. 49.
The really learned in theology are respected by all,
but they are infrequently encountered. It would be
fairer to admit that some of the documents in use
are themselves imperfect and antiquated, that they

have been in many respects outgrown, and that truth
as now perceived can now be more clearly expressed.
But I refrain from any more ecclesiastical sugges-
tions.
Perhaps, however, I may unobtrusively remark
that such expressions as righteous vengeance, angry
Father, wrathful Lamb, do not seem satisfactory
forms whereby to represent what the Bishop well calls
"a stately and austere conception of order." Nor is
it likely that ''the bright front and buoyant tread of
early discipleship" arose from anything so negative as

sin overcome: it was not that which animated the
Apostles; and though it certainly contributed to the
inspiration of the Magdalene, we should hardly speak
*
of 'bright front and buoyant tread" in her case.
Something more positive is needed to explain any
living and energising enthusiasm. The incidental
treatment of sin in Chapter X. is, however, one of the
points on which further explanation is certainly de-
sirable; and all the supplementary points I now pro-
pose to deal with may be grouped under four heads
as follows:
1. That evolutionary treatment of sin is apt to
minimise unduly the sense of sinfulness.

2. That it is misleading to deny the revealed Wrath
of the Holy One against sin.
3. That heresy lurks in any non-professional treat-
ment of the relation between the Humanity and Di-

vinity of Christ.
;
4. That while controverting the notion of vicarious

punishment, the true significance of the doctrine of a
vicarious Atonement may be missed.
Let us take these points in order.
1. On page 204 above the following sentence oc-

curs:
"As a matter of fact the higher man of to-day is
not worrying about his sins at all, still less about their
punishment: his mission if he is good for anything,
is to be up and doing."
When writing these words I was well aware that
they laid me open to a retort based u]3on John ix. 41
nevertheless the statement seems to me true "as a mat-
ter of fact," provided by "higher men" are under-
stood leaders in the world's activity, whether they are
working in the pubhc eye or in the study or in the
office, or anywhere save in the cloister. Perhaps when
so put it will be granted, merely as a matter of fact,
if saints are excluded, and if no moral judgment in
favour of the thesis is claimed or supposed to be in-
volved in the statement. But it will be contended that
more than a matter of fact was implied in that sen-
tence, that there was an element of judgment also,
and that it was one of approbation: that the epithet
"higher" signified that a man who was up and doing,
instead of introspecting and mourning over his sins,
was path of progress, and was to be praised
in the
rather than blamed. Undoubtedly I did mean that
too; and in order implicitly to justify that attitude,
without presumption and without tedious contention,
I gave two Biblical references —

one to Matt. xxiv.
46, where the "servant who is found so doing" is au-
thoritatively "blessed," and the other to the warning
contained in Matt. apologue about the
xii. 43, that
fate of a house which was left unoccupied after hav-
ing been cleansed and decorated.
It may surely without unorthodoxy be held that
there are two ways of overcoming sin and sinful tend-
encies one the direct way, of concentrating attention
:
on them with brooding and lamentation the other the ;
indirect and, as I think, the safer and more efficacious

and altogether more profitable way, of putting in so
many hours' work per day, and of excluding weeds
from the garden by energetic cultivation of healthy
plants.
It will be said that brooding and lamentation is not
a fit description of the exercises of religion, that a
safeguard of a higher order than any terrestrial oc-
cupation can be secured by conscious emotional peni-
tence and aspiration. It may be so but it is not quite ;
certain. The following sonnet may or may not be

good poetry, but it would appear to embody, in ex-
aggerated and feminine form, a phase of experience
not unfamiliar to the ordinary human soul:
"A soul of many longings entered late

A chapel like a jewel blazing bright,
And fell upon the altar steps. All night
She held with hopes and agonies debate;
With tears the litanies love-passionate
Drenched her; triumphant colours burned her white;
And, as the incense flamed in silver light,
God sealed her to His own novitiate.
— —
"And then, because her eyes were charmed with peace.
And blinded by the stars new-born within
The lit sweet lids God's dreams had loverfed,
Nine paces from that House of Ecstasies
Her feet were taken in the snares of sin;
And, ere the morning quickened, she was dead." i
We must all of us have known what it is to be com-

pelled to say, not always, nor often, it is to be hoped,
— ît is as stupid to exaggerate in these as in any other
matters, — ^but occasionally in the course of our hves,
or even constantly in connexion with some minor in-
grained habit which we should hke to overcome,
"Video meliora, proboque,
Deteriora sequor."
And doing not what we see to be best, but some-

this
thing inferior which we do not really approve or will
to do, is what constitutes one aspect of sin. Plato,
indeed, argues in the Gorgias that a wicked man is
not really obeying his own will, that he is enslaved and
acting contrary to his true self; but whether that be
so or not, few of us have the spirit to be wilful sin-
ners. Wilful sin is, as has been often said, rebellion
and lawlessness, the misuse and misapplication of nat-
ural powers; it is akin to dirt, to disease, to weeds
i,e, to matter and cells and plants out of place, and
working harm instead of good. It is like a fire es-

caped from control and consuming instead of serving.
Even so a banked-up lake constructed for the water-
supply of a city, if it burst its embankment, may
whelm villages in flood.
1 One of Rachael Annand Taylor's poems, called "The Vanity of
Vows," quoted in the Times Literary Supplement for 15th April 1904.
Our business is and control, to direct and

to restrain
guide, the forces of nature and our own forces. The
man of vigorous sin, rightly trained and directed, may
become the man of wholesome energy. There is some
valuable material being wasted in our prisons: unre-
claimed soil festering for lack of plough and harrow.
Good men of small and restrained activity may not
constitute the most most approved in-
efficient or the
struments of progress. The ascetic may endeavour
to avoid all danger, by never making a mountain lake,
by never lighting a fire, by never going to sea, by run-
ning no risks and living a poverty-stricken existence;
and may succumb after all: as soldiers may be econo-
mised in war till they fall victims to some miserably
ignominious disease. We
are called upon rather for
full exercise of all our powers, for full vigour of life,
but subject to discipline and reason and restraint.
What we call vices and virtues are compounded of
very similar vital forces their character
: dependent
is
on the direction we give them. Every activity can be

deflected from the vicious into the virtuous direction;
and an unsought joy is the reward.
While dealing with these everyday considerations,
it is desirable to avoid misconception by exphcitly
making the admission that doubtless there is a sense in

which radical imperfection can be predicated of the
whole human race without exception: the sense in
which the heavens can be said to be unclean and the
angels to be chargeable with folly the sense in which
;
Job, though able to rebut the charge of hidden wick-

— ;
edness brought by his friends, was wiUing abundantly

to admit vileness when accosted by the Deity.
For devotional purposes comparison of human-
this
ity with infinite Perfectionand infinite attributes gen-
erally may be appropriate and useful, though no finite
emendation can be effective against it one would ex-
;
pect the feeling aroused by contemplation of Infini-

tude to be one of humihty and abasement rather than
one of contrition and penitence, but I admit that saints
have found it otherwise, and that their experience is
conclusive.
2. So much for practical and human considerations

but there is another and more important matter, on
which explanation is needed, namely, where I con-
tend that the sacrifice of Christ need not be regarded
as expiatory, or as appeasing the righteous anger of
a wrathful God, because (p. 211).
"He had felt no wrath at the blind efforts, the ris-
ings and sinkings, of men struggling in the mire from

bestial to human attributes —there \ysLS nothing to ap-
pease."
This has been attacked as unscriptural "Angry :
with the wicked every day," "The wrath of the

Lamb," and a multitude of familiar texts, can easily
be quoted.
Very well, the epithet "unscriptural" has no coer-
cive force unless the text appealed to carries with it a
conviction of its own inspiration. There is plenty of
"anger" in the Old Testament undoubtedly, but that
is just where one would expect to find it on the sur-
vival hypothesis; and I doubt not the Prophets had

plenty to make them angry/
But it is scarcely worth while to waste time in dis-
cussing the relative authority of texts every one must :
be aware that this is no rose-water world; the things

that have happened in it, and the things that may yet
happen in it, are appalling. We must admit the force
of experiences which gave birth to ejaculations such
as Luke xii. 5 and Hebrews x. 31, whoever may have
been their author, and I am glad of the opportunity
of enlarging upon this subject of sin and Divine
anger somewhat; it was quite too briefly and super-
ficially treated in Chapter X. indeed it was not really
:
dealt with at all.
It suited the priests to say that God was angry

when a budding nation desired to have a king in order
to weldit together. It suited them to say that he was
angry when prisoners were taken captive instead of
1 Of random the first is from Psalm
the two texts above quoted at
vii. and the words "with the wicked" seem to be a gratuitous in-
11,
terpolation of the translators, an evident attempt to make intelligible
the supposed sentence, "God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry
—
every day." The Prayer Book version more effective as usual ren- —
ders it thus, "God is a righteous Judge, strong and patient, and God
is provoked every day"; which is doubtless as true as any statement of
the kind can be.

"The wrath of the Lamb" occurs only in Revelation, so far as I
know; and there also is to be found that hyperbole, intensified from
Isaiah and from a common industry of the country, about the vintage
of blood flowing "to the horse-bridles" from the trodden winepress of
the wrath of God. The author's feelings are evidently overcharged.
And if we had lived in times of really efficient persecutioTi we too
might have tried, less poetically, to assuage our indignant helplessness in
the same sort of way.
being massacred; and again that he was WToth when

the first census was contemplated.
So also in rather later times God was represented
as angry with idolaters, not ostensibly because some
special practices of idol-worship may have been de-
basing, but because he was "jealous." There are
plenty of good reasons against idolatry among intelli-
gent and "chosen" people, but this is not one of them:
nor is it to be supposed that the stock of a tree is ever
really worshipped, even when prostrated to. An idol,
to ignorant and undeveloped people, is a symbol of
something which they are really worshipping under a
material form and embodiment: the sensuous pre-
sentation assists their infantile efforts towards ab-
stract thought, as material sacraments help people in
a higher stage of religious development. But some
of these helps should be outgrown. An adult mathe-
matician hardly needs a geometrical figure, crudely
composed of fragments of chalk or smears of plum-
bago or ink, to help him to reason; and if he uses
such a diagram he is aware that he is not really at-
tending to it, but is reasoning about ideal and unreal-
isable perfections; he has soared above the symbol,
and is away among the cementing laws of the uni-
verse.
If an image or a tree-trunk or other symbol helps a
savage to meditate on some divine and intractable con-
ception, if it has been so used by thousands of his an-
cestors,and has acquired a halo of reverence through
antiquity and by the accumulation of human emotion
lavished upon it, — a missionary should think twice
before he isrude to it, or abuses it or pulls it down.

We do not rebuke a child for lavishing a wealth of
nascent maternal affection on some grotesque black-
Betty of a wooden rag-covered doll; we do not de-
spise, we honour, a regiment content to be decimated
so it may save its flag, —
^which materially is almost a
nonentity. And so if we send missionaries, we should
send competent men, who will gradually educate by
implanting useful arts and positive virtues; and we
should tell these messengers clearly that negative and
iconoclastic teaching may be very cruel.
These things depend upon grade attained. It was
very right for Hebrew prophets to feel indignant and
to wax sarcastic when they saw the degenerate wor-
ship of a moderately enlightened people descending
to the level of a grinning idol or the stock of a tree;
and they may have rightly felt that to replace such
symbols as these by the more advanced symbol of an
angry and jealous God would be a spiritual help of
the highest kind possible to a nation at such a stage
of ethical development. In this manner the texts con-
cerning anger and jealousy can be amply accounted
for.
Moreover, like most other symbolism, they embody
a real truth. Quite irrespective of texts in its favour,
we may be willing to recognise Divine wrath as a real
and terrible thing; though we must also be ready to
admit that the gloom of religions antecedent to Chris-
and its own later struggle amid nascent civiH-
tianity,
sation,overshadowed the Gospel message unduly;
and fear was a powerful weapon in the hands of
—
priests,which they did not fail to employ. But I feel

no contradiction between all this and the above quota-
tion from page 211. So far as I can judge, it is
not likely that a Deity operating through a process
of evolution can feel wrath at the blind efforts of his
creatures struggling upward in the mire. I judge
rather that the human impulse to lend them a pitiful
and helpful hand can with difficulty be restrained, can
indeed only be restrained by lofty and far-seeing Wis-
dom, and by perception of "the far-off interest of
tears."
Nevertheless, I am sure that what may without ir-
reverence be humanly spoken of as fierce Wrath

against sin, and even against a certain class of sinner,
is But, then, what do we mean by
a Divine attribute.
"sin" in this connection? It is a term which, in a dif-
ferent sense from charity, likemse covers a multitude.
I do not wish to enter upon a dissertation on the na-
ture of sin in general from the scientific standpoint.
For our present purpose we can regard the matter
quite simply, as something of which we have all plenty
of experience but I maintain that when we are speak-
;
ing of the sin against which God's anger blazes, we

do not mean the sins of failure, the burden of remorse,
the acts which cause contrition and penitence on the
part of a saint or a child or a labouring man a
labouring man or woman of any class we mean some-
;
thing quite other than that. And I assume that

therein we are consistent with the doctrines of the
Church.
If not a wicked absurdity, it is surely a libel to as-
SIN, SUFFERING AND WRATH 2S1
sert that God is angry with ordinary human failings,

and with the dismal lapses from virtue of poor out-
casts of civilisation. We
are famihar, for instance,
with the fierce wrath of Christ, his language was —
denunciatory in the extreme but against what sort of
:
people? It was not the publicans and the harlots

whom he stigmatised as a generation of vipers, or
whom he threatened with the damnation of hell;
rather it was some specimens of the unco' guid of that
day —people perfectly satisfied with themselves, peo-
ple ready to forbid deeds of healing on the Sabbath,
and eager to stifle the holiest if they had the chance ^
— was with these that he was angry, not with any-
ît
one who could be described as helplessly and ineffi-

ciently struggling out of the mire towards better
things.
There were sins of which he was genuinely
ashamed, so that he stooped and wrote upon the
ground when they were suddenly obtruded upon his
notice by coarse experimenters: shame so acute that
even those ruffians had the grace subsequently to slink
away; but it was stoning of the Prophets, wilful
blindness to the Highest, it was blasphemy against
the Holy Ghost, that excited his fiercest reprobation.
Just as it is impossible for the human race at any
given time to select that one of their number who will
be best remembered a thousand years hence, so it is
difficult for us to judge what class of people are rend-
ering themselves most liable to high Displeasure now,
1 Mark iii. 5, 6, 29.

232 SCIENXE AXD CHRISTIANITY
I suppose that the respectable and religious world of

Judffia was genuinely astonished, and not a httle scan-
dahsed, at its vigorous denunciation by an itinerant
Preacher, long ago; and it is just possible that to-day
those self-satisfied people who shut their eyes to truth,
and propagate error, are at least as harmful to the
general advance as are some indi^-iduals whom Society
for its o^î safety finds it necessary" to keep in seclu-
sion/
A Church wliich, let us say, excommunicates Tol-
stoi may possibly be composed of pious individuals
whom it does not become us to judge, but I can con-
ceive that in its corporate capacity' any Church which
opposes reform, wliich persistently takes the wrong
side,which sustains abuses such as the droits de seig-
neur in the past, and perhaps other only less flagrant
abuses to-day, may be regarded as deservdng of vig-
orous Denunciation; and if such an institution, in
some neighbouring country or elsewhere, should hap-
pen to fall upon evil days, it may find itself unsuc-
cessful in its endeavour to fasten the blame upon any-
thing but itself.
There are many grades of sin; and anyone may

know the kind of sin which excites the anger of God,
by bethinldng him of the kind which arouses his o^vn
1 And, may it not be also possible that the omission on
incidentally,
make any serious and satisfactory effort to train
the part of Society to
and humanise and redeem those whom it thus takes under its providential
control (not to mention their subjection to the inhuman device of solitary
confinement) is liable to be regarded in High Quarters as deserving of
reprobation just as severe as that accorded to any more actively com-
mitted crime?
best and most righteous anger. I can imagine that

the infernal proceedings of Nero and of the Holy
Inquisition were repugnant and nauseating to the
Universe to a degree which was almost unbearable.
The fierce indignation that would blaze out if one
were maliciously to torture a child or an animal in view
of an ordinary man or woman, would surely be a
spark of the Divine wrath and we have been told that
;
a millstone round the neck of a child-abuser is too

light a penalty.
Sins of this kind are a boil, an abscess, on the Uni-
verse they : must be attacked and cured by human co-
operators, they are hardly tractable otherwise; ^
just
as in the complex aggregate of cells we call our body
the dominant intelligence cannot unaided cope with
its own disease, but must depend on the labours of its
micro-organisms, the phagocytes, which swarm to any

poisoned plague spot, and there actively and painfully
struggle with and inflame and attack the evil, till one
side or other is overcome: so it is with man as an
active ingredient in the universe. We are the white
corpuscles of the cosmos: and like the corpuscles we
are an essential ingredient of the system, our full po-
tentiality being latent until stimulated into activity
by disease.
If it is possible for a man at times to feel a sort of
hatred and anger against his own weaker and worser
self, so I can imagine a God feeling what may be
imperfectly spoken of as disgust and wrath at de-
1 Psalm cxv. IG.
234, SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY
fects which still exist in his Universe —in Himself,

dare we say ? —defects for which in a manner he is in
some sort responsible, defects which he has either
caused, or for ultimate reasons permitted, or has not
yet, in the present stage of evolution, been able to
cure consistently with full education and adequate
scope for free development of personahty; defects
which surely his conscious creatures will assist him to
remove, now that the bare possibihty of the existence
of these ferocious evils has done its salutary and ulti-
mately beneficent work.
In this sense, therefore, it would be inappropriate
to deny any amount of wrath against sin and even
against the blatant sinner — of people who
^the class
can only be impressed by the falling of a stone which

shall grind them to powder. But it is not for people
in the vicious state that the consolations of rehgion
are available, they are not the bruised reed whom he
will not break and there
: is no sense in perplexing or-
dinary struggling, kindly, weak, unhappy humanity,
with alleged fearful penalties attaching to even
minor disobedience: penalties which must be exacted
somehow, no matter much from whom; nor need we
spoil people's conception of the Fatherhood of God
with distorted legends, representing him as a Roman
Father who will not scruple to visit their sins and
shortcomings upon the innocent body of his own Son,
since that is the only condition on which his wrath
may be turned away and his hand not stretched out
still.
—
3. There is one sentence in my last chapter wherein

I appear to suggest that Christ's body was human,
his spirit divine; thus making a possibly untenable
though simple distinction between the vehicle and the
manifestation, and trespassing on a theological terri-
tory which is full of heretical pit-falls.
It would have been better to avoid even the appear-
ance of entering on so large a question as the nature
of Christ by a mere side-door. My object at the mo-
ment was not anything so ambitious, but merely to
indicate what would be the effect on mankind of the
arrival of a personage, with a human and therefore
accessible and mortal body, animated by a spirit of
divine perfection. I wished to urge that among the
results of the thorough incarnation of a truly Divine
Spirit would be the beginnings of a real atonement
between man and God and that the influence exerted
;
would be exerted wholly on man. Farther than that

I did not then intend to go; nor do I propose to go
much farther now, though the temptation is consider-
able. It is easy to recognise that the subjects of the
Incarnation and the Resurrection are profoundly dif-
ficult, and yet to feel impelled to express surprise at
the language which eminent theologians sometimes

permit themselves to employ. I take the following
astounding sentence from Canon Moberly's article in
JLux Mundi:
P. 236. "No
one will now dispute that Jesus died
upon If He did not on the third day rise
the Cross.
again from that death to life cadit quccstio all —
Christian dogma, all Christian faith, is at an end."
:
I suppose it is intended as a paraphrase of St.

Paul's "If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching
vain and your faith is also vain." But the two state-
ments are perfectly different. If Christ be not risen
in some sense or other, if his death was the end of him,
according to the current but perhaps not quite cor-
rect conception of the death of a dog, then indeed is
the prospect blank.
But "rise again from death to life on the third day"
must mean far more than persistent existence and in-
fluence it seems to mean resuscitation, after the man-
:
ner of Lazarus. Indeed, the fourth article of the

Church definitely asserts that it does mean that and
more. But an attempt to Hnk the whole of Christian
faith inextricably with an anatomical statement about
flesh and bones, as in Article 4 of the AngUcan
Church, is rash.
Again
P. 237. ''No one to-day disputes that He was
truly man. Is it true that He was very God? It is
either true or false. As to the fact there are only the

two alternatives. And between the two the gulf is
impassable. If it is not false it is true. If it is not
absolutely true it is absolutely false."
Do theologians always know what they mean when
they glibly use, in a serious and solemn sense, the
awful term God? Have they any notion of the Uni-
verse at all? Are they still limited to tribal or plane-
tary conceptions of Deity? They talk, or used to
talk, about "dispensations." We ourselves, as a na-
tion, give dispensations to children or savages other
than we should give to developed people a planetary ;
dispensation is one thing, a planetary God another.

These attempted identifications of the Messiah with
the Most High, verge on the blasphemous. When
Peter was blessed for a burst of bold and enthusiastic
affirmation and adequate recognition of Christ's di-
vine nature, he said no such thing as that. What he
said was, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living
God."
As to affirming that Christ is either God or is not
God and that there is nothing more to be said: there
are few complex propositions of which so simple a
positive or negative affirmation can be made. For
instance, it is almost proverbially difficult to reply to
the childish question whether a given historical char-
acterwas "good" or was not good.
The word God must have an infinite diversity of
meaning, and two uses of the term are prominent.
One connotes vaguely the Absolute Sustainer and
Comprehender of all existence: the other signifies
such detailed conception of Godhead as the human
race has been able to frame. This latter has been
helped on mightily by the revelation of Jesus, among
—
who can accept it, the revelation of genuinely
those
human faculties and feelings, and even something of
the unconscious simplicity, of childhood,^ in the Di-
vine Being, —and the further revelation, so enthusias-
glimpsed by the youthful David near the end
tically
of Browning's poem "Saul," the perception that Di-
1 Luke ix. 48.
—
2S8 SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY
vine as well as human love may be and actually is
strong enough to submit to sacrifice and genuine suf-

fering on behalf of the beloved.
This revelation and perception may to some have
become so keen and piercing that to no other aspect of
Godhead can they pay attention. These are they
who say that Christ was very God in the absolute
sense; and subjectively they may be right. It is a
statement, not of what they conceive of Christ, but of
what they mean by God. One cannot define or ex-
plain the known in terms of the unknown.
4. Lastly we come to the doctrine of a vicarious

Atonement, and in what sense that can be considered
to embody a genuine truth. The late Bishop of
Southampton, Dr. Arthur Lyttelton, in his article on
the Atonement in Lux Mundi (pp. 282, 283), says
that
'Tt was from the Law that the Jews derived their
religious language; their conceptions of sacrifice, of
atonement, of the effects of sin, were moulded by the
influence of the Mosaic ceremonies. . . . The sacri-
ficial ceremonies and language of the Law throw light
upon the apostolic conception of the Sacrifice, the
Atonement of Christ."
With this historical estimate I entirely agree. The
ceremony of the Scapegoat, and indeed the whole so-
calledMosaic system, are clearly responsible for a
great deal of the doctrine which penetrated into the
New Testament, and has survived even to the present
day.
But then it will be same Article is

found that this
full of the word "propitiation": —
a word which em-
bodies compactly what I regard as an error or a
crudity, and serves to focus the issue. The basis of
his contention throughout is given succinctly in the
following passage (p. 282) :
"Examination of the sacrificial system of the Old

Testament is necessary in a discussion of the doctrine
of the Atonement, for several reasons.
"The institutions of the Law were, in the first
place, ordained by God, and therefore intended to re-

veal in some degree His purposes, His mind towards
man."
That where I join issue. I would rather go to
is
the opposite extreme and say that the Gospel was an

attempt to break away from sacrificial and priestly
tradition; that the "not destroy but fulfil" referred
to the major denunciations and other accumulations
of race-experience, which were on right lines as far
as they went, not to the minor institutions and super-
stitions which had become an incubus destructive of
living personal religion. We
may not all in every
respect be equally enamoured of the parable of the
—
Prodigal Son I myself am conscious of a subter-
ranean sympathy with the sentiments expressed by
his elder brother —
but the whole story is very human,
very familiar, and full of manifest inspiration; and
without wishing to press it unduly, we must admit that
any feehng of wrath against the offender, or even
against the offence, is rather conspicuously absent
from its scheme. The sense of guilt is there, in pro-
—
nounced form, but and its

as a one-sided feeling;
paternal counterpart seems not to have been removed
by expiatory sacrifice or by propitiation of any kind,
but simply to be non-existent. There is very little
residue of the jNIosaic dispensation in that story.
So markedly has been felt indeed by some
this
preachers that, in dismay at finding themselves
adrift from their familiar moorings, a few have
actually seized upon the fatted calf and tried to
construct some kind of propitiatory sacrifice out of
that.
But observe that I have never said a word against
vicarious suffering: I have contended against the
notion of vicarious punishment —a very different
idea. But I cannot agree with ever\i:hing that is said
—
even about vicarous suffering real though it admit-
tedly is. For instance, the Bishop of Southwark
urges that the vicarious suffering of the Atonement
did somehow redress, cancel, redeem, propitiate,
these words are used in a private letter, while their
substance appears in the article above referred to,
and he appears to insist that the idea of a Father who

isnecessarily hard upon us because liimself so right-
eous, is a part of the orthodox view. With great de-
ference I cannot admit the appropriateness of the
above verbs to modern insight; they seem to me sat-
urated with the atmosphere of pagan survival and of
ante-Isaiah Jewish traditions.No one supposes them
to apply to \acious and persistent sins; but if they
only apply to negligences and ignorances for which
we are heartily sorry and earnestly repent, they are
unnecessary, except in a subjective and comforting

sense.
But then this is a real sense: there must be some
meaning in the perennial experience of relief and
renovation at the Cross. Was it not there that Chris-
tian's burden fell, —type of many thousands of de-
vout persons? no regenerating agency at
Is there
work mass of real human ex-
in justification of this
perience? Far be it from me to doubt it; and it be-
hoves me, who have presumed to emphasise one aspect,
to emphasise the other also, in order to make a picture
not too obviously incomplete and one-sided.
I am now going to use the word "sin" in its theo-
logical and, so to speak, "official" sense, —the sense of
imperfection, disunion, lack of harmony, the struggle
among the members that St. Paul for all time ex-
pressed; there is usually associated with it a sense of
impotence, a recognition of the impossibility of
achieving peace and unity in one's own person, a feel-
ing that aid must be forthcoming from a higher
source. It is this feeling which enables the spectacle
of any noble self-sacrificing human action to have an
elevating effect, it is this which gropes after the pos-
sibihties of the highest in human nature, it is a feeling
which for large tracts of this planet has found its
highest stimulus and completest satisfaction in the
life and death of Christ. All religions worthy of the
name are based upon some heroic and self-sacrificing
life, upon some man with clearer vision than his fel-
lows, one who is in closer touch and sympathy with

the Divine.
And not insight and heroism alone : Paul was ahle

to bear the sufferings of this present time with hero-
ism, but Paul was not crucified for us, nor are we bap-
tised in the name of Paul.No, there is evidently
something unique about the majesty of Jesus of Naz-
areth which raises him above the rank of man; and
the wilhngness of such a Being to share our nature,
to live the life of a peasant, and to face the horrible
certainty of execution by torture, in order personally
to help those whom he was pleased to call his brethren,
is a race-asset which, however masked and overlaid
with foreign growths, yet gleams through every cov-

ering and suffuses the details of common life with
fragrance.
This conspicuously has been a redeeming, or rather
*
—
a regenerating agency I know nothing of "cancel-
*
ling," 'redressing," or 'propitiating": those words I
repudiate; but it —
has regenerated, for by filling the
soul with love and adoration and fellow-feeling for
the Highest, the old cravings have often been almost
hypnotically rendered distasteful and repellent, the
bondage of been loosened from many a spirit,
sin has
the lower entangled self has been helped from the
slough of despond and raised to the shores of a larger
hope, whence it can gradually attain to harmony and
peace.
There are other parts of the Hon. Arthur Lyttel-

ton's beautiful essay on the Atonement in Lux Mundi
to which I should like to refer. I find myself in
agreement with the initial three or four pages and
with the concluding three or four pages ahnost en-

tirely.By dint of working through a maze of rather
intractable material, which he treats as well as it is
possible for it to be treated, he arrives at what I con-

ceive to be the legitimate conclusion. He discards
the infinite-punishment doctrine completely, he
brushes lightly aside M'Leod Campbell's infinite-re-
pentance modification of it, and he attempts to justify
the view of a perfect sacrifice.
So far as he associates this with vicarious penalty
and emphasises the propitiatory aspect of the Atone-
ment, he goes, as I consider, wrong; he even argues
that in his agony and death the Son must have been
engaged in propitiating not only his Father's wrath
but his own also; that he was, in fact, taking upon
himself, and so both retrospectively and prospectively
warding off from others, the wrath of the Lamb.
This truly is a logical outcome of the orthodox doc-
trine, but it should serve as one of the modes of dis-
crediting some of the crudity in that doctrine and re-
ducing it to a kind of absurdity.
But when Dr. Lyttelton arrives at page 310 he has
emerged from IMosaic mediaevalism into an atmos-
phere of truth: it is true that Christ bore his suffer-
ings, aswe should learn to bear ours, victoriously and
in unbroken union with God. He showed that the
highest and the best might have to suffer, so long as
the world was imperfect.
In an admirable essay on "Pain" by J. II. Ilhng-
worth in Lu^r Mundi this part of the matter is put
with great clearness:
"Once for all the sinless suffering of the Cross has

parted sin from suffering with a clearness of distinc-
tion never before achieved. • . . The sight of perfect
sinlessness combined mth perfect suffering has
cleared our view for ever. . . . Sin indeed always
brings suffering in its train, but the suffering we now
see to be of the natmx of its antidote. . . . But while
sin involves suffering, suffering does not involve sin.
. . . We suffer because we sin, but we also sin because
we decline to suffer. . . . The pleasures of each gen-
eration evaporate in air ; it is their pains that increase
the spiritual momentum of the world." And so on
(p. 123 to the end).
The problem which had puzzled the ages, the prob-
lem of the book of Job, of the tower of Siloam, was
practically solved.
And Clirist showed how the sting might be taken
out of all suffering by meeting it with a spirit of un-
daunted faith. The power of sin lay in the presence
of an evil and rebellious disposition. Rid of that, and
though pains and sorrows would come as before, they
could be faced in a spirit, not of submission only, but
of undying love and hope and almost joy.
So the cognate or complementary problem of the
—
Greek Dramatists also the problem which looms
large in the tragedies of Euripides in especial the —
dread that man is the sport and plaything of omnipo-
—
tence the fear, the paralysing fear, of caprice or
even wickedness on the part of higher powers the —
dismal uncertainty whether pain is not sometimes
mere gratuitous torture, the outcome of divine jeal-
ousy or malevolence or anger or some other pagan

attribute: all this was somehow removed from man-
kind by the victory of Christ, and except in a few
individual cases has never very seriously troubled it
since.
Not only was and tem-
indifference to suffering
poral loss the outcome of but there was superadded
it,
a certain glory in suffering, in emulation of so noble

an example: to fill up, as was hyperbolically said,
what was behind; this feeling infused such vitality
into the Apostles and the early Church as to carry
them victoriously through a terrible period of danger
and untold misery. It made them staunch men and ;
emperors found that they simply could not effectively

hurt those whom this faith had seized. And in less
troublous times the element of suffering and poverty
was still felt to be so vital that it was often self-in-
flicted in order to secure a deeper joy. So is it always
in ages of burning faith; comfort and luxury and
this present life, with all that they rightly contain of
happiness, are cast aside as almost worthless in ex-
change for a spiritual exaltation.
But it enthusiasm and
will be said that this violent
contempt for mere individual temporal well-being is
not Christian alone, that it is common to all religions.
Granted. I will not contend that Christ was the only
channel of this influence, though he has been the chan-
nel for most of us; nor do Buddhism, Brahminism,
Mohammedanism, Confucianism, exhaust the cate-
gory of religions more or less efficient in this particu-
lar. In islands of strange worship, amid savages of
unclean life, the same enthusiasm for the spiritual as

dominating the material is felt for it is a part of the
;
truth of God, and is hmited to no age or creed. And

in countries which by superficial outsiders are said
to have no religious faith it is to be found. The Jap-
anese soldier throws away his indi\ddual life by the
thousand, in order that his nation may take a noble
place in the world and begin its destined work of
civilising Asia; yet when heis dead what is Asia or
his country to him? Hemust be dominated by a hv-

ing faith, in perhaps he knows not what. He may
not be able to express it, but his faith may be none the
less efficient for lacking the outward precision of an
Athanasian formula.
But whatever be the case mtli other religions, the
sacrifice of Christ has convinced the Western world
of sin to a unique degree, of its reality and dire con-
sequence, of its unreasonableness, its aspect as a dis-
—
ease which must be cured with the knife if need be,
but cured; we have learnt that it is foreign to the
universe, it is not the will of God, it is not due to his
caprice, or amusement, or dictation, or predestination,
or pagan example; it is something which gives even
Him pain and suffering it is something to be rid of,
;
and there is no peace or joy to be had until unity of

will is secured and past rebellions are forgiven. The
sin of the creature involves suffering in the Creator:
the whole of existence is so bound together that dis-
ease in one partmeans pain throughout. This is the
element of truth in the \dcariousness of suffering,
and in extension of suffering to the Highest; but it
is not vicariously penal, nor is it propitiatory.

The orthodox doctrine of the Atonement implicitly
maintains that God cannot forgive sin, unless and
until He has exacted an adequate penalty somewhere.
This does embody a kind of truth, for an eddy of
conduct, good or ill, can only disappear by expending
its energy in producing some definite effect. In one
sense, therefore, a penalty must follow every inhar-
monious action: a penalty not falling on the wrong-
doer alone, but, involving the innocent likewise, and
bringing needless pain into existence. Perception of
this may be part of the punishment, for there can
hardly be a fiercer feeling than remorse but the sting ;
will not be fully felt till the spirit has become broken
and and open to the healing influences of
contrite
forgiveness. There is no agony like that of returning
animation. Forgiveness removes no penalty: it may
even increase pain, though only that of a regenera-
tive kind; it leaves material consequences unaltered,
but it may achieve spiritual reform.
Divine forgiveness is undoubtedly mysterious, but
it must be real, for we are conscious that we can for-
give each other. It should be an axiom that what-

ever man can do, God a fortiori can do also meaning ;
by "man" not merely any poor individual man, but

the whole highest ethos of the race, including saints,
apostles, prophets, everj^body, —and including Christ
himself. How are we taught to ask for forgiveness
of sins? As we forgive others. This does not solely
mean, as it is usually taken to mean, because we for-

give others, nor in so far as, nor on condition that we
forgive our fellows, but it means after the same
fashion as we forgive or should forgive them. And
the reason given is a luminous one; it has nothing to
do with propitiation, it makes no reference to sacrifice
or vicarious penalty, nor to the merits of any media-
tor; no, the reason givenis a noble and sufficient one,
and it is simply this: "For Thine is the Kingdom,

and the Power, and the Glory, for ever." What
more can we add but the word "Amen"?
I
CHAPTER XII
THE MATERIAL ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
MEN of science who make a life-study of the

terial world alone, and habitually close their
ma-
minds to the influences of poetry and of emotional

and religious and even philosophical hterature gen-
erally, are apt to grow into the belief that the material
aspect of the universe is the only aspect which mat-
ters, —sometimes going so far as to hold that it is the
only aspect which is truly real.
Theologians and mystics and even men of letters,
are liable to err in a similar though complementary
manner, and by exclusive attention to one region of
human nature become so imbued with its supreme
importance that they ignore and despise the universe
of matter, force, and energy; regarding with com-
placence not only their own ignorance, but the ignor-
ance also of teachers of youth.
This distinction between schools of thought on
the intellectual plane is fairly obvious; and a similar
distinction holds also in the religious sphere.
There are on the one hand, who hold that
those,
"God" and "spiritual beings"and "guidance" and
"intelligent control" are words of only superstitious
—
meaning that the world, as revealed by our senses,
is the sole reality, our bodily life our true and only
249
existence, and the world of poetry and religion but a

dream.
There are those, on the other hand, who so im-
merse themselves in spiritual contemplation that the
things of sense shrink into nothingness, and our pres-
ent life, with all that pertains to bodily and terrestrial
activity, becomes insignificant, or even acquires a neg-
ative value, since material things are a snare and a
temptation, tending to divert our feet from the true
path, and apt to fill our souls with clogging and
vicious trifles.
The extreme in the one case has been called roughly
materialism or naturalism or positivism; its religion
is a practical religion of human nature and earthly
service, its god a glorified humanity, and its immor-
tality merely racial, being one of sentiment and mem-
ory.
The extreme in the other case has been called spirit-
ualism or mysticism or asceticism or puritanism, for
it has many phases; its religion is largely occupied
with worship, sometimes in the form of contemplative
awe and ecstasy, sometimes of labour for the glory
of God; its God is a high and holy Personality of
illimitable perfection, far removed from the strug-
gles and trials of this mortal life, which is a mere epi-
sode or probationary discipline before men's souls are
lapped for ever in the peace of the Eternal, or are
tortured by exclusion from His presence for all eter-
nity.
Between the extremes comes the religion which we
know as Christianity. Looked at cosmically, this
MATERIAL ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 251
aims at being a comprehensive and inclusive scheme,

capable of embracing the essential elements of both
the other systems, —
recognising and worshipping God
in the Highest, loving and serving man even at his
lowest, accepting the facts of nature and despising
nothing that exists, desiring to utilise the opportuni-
tiesof this present life to the uttermost, and yet be-
heving that it is possibly not the beginning, certainly
not the end, of our existence; rejoicing in the objects
of sense, realising also the beauty and truth of things
only reached now by studious contemplation, reject-
ing the idea of any ultimate conflict between matter
and spirit, and, when they appear to conflict, giving
supremacy to the spiritual.
It is the mission of the Priest to emphasise one of
these aspects; it is the business of the Naturalist to
emphasise the other ; it is the desire of the Philosopher
to realise the element of truth in both departments, to
grasp truth in its breadth and comprehensiveness;
while it is the duty of the Religious man to apply the
truths, so recognised, in the conduct of practical life.
But the task of the unifier is not an easy one; it is
not to be supposed that every exuberant utterance of
the mystic is true, that every balanced imitation of the
naturalist is and that it only remains to under-
true,
stand and accept both. His task is much harder than
that: he has to exercise discrimination, to scrutinise
and weigh carefully, not letting himself be over-per-
suaded by the enthusiasts on either side, and so gradu-
ally to evolve for himself a system of thought whicli is
as true and helpful as may be possible to a being in his
—
present state of development. This is the task which

lies before us all, and upon which the
this is the task
great prophets of humanity, each in his day and gen-
eration, have been engaged. This work absorbs the
attention of many leading Christian theologians at
the present time —^men who exhibit welcome breadth
of knowledge and are imbued with scientific method.
I. The Correspondence of Spiritual and Ma-

terial
First of all, then, the whole doctrine of "Incarna-
tion" exhibits an idea of the interaction between the
spiritual and material. Just as man has at least a dual
—
nature the material organism and the dominant mind
— so it was felt must God be thought of as interacting
directly with this material scheme, and must be sup-
posed incarnated in or clothed upon with a material
body, subject to gro^vth, disintegration, and death,
like our own. An extraordinary and bold concep-
tion, manifestly symbolic or pictorial of something,
not literal nor reducible to any simple formula, ît —
nevertheless involves a great truth, the kinship be-
tween and matter. Any divine revelation to be
spirit
accessible to us, must have an accessible and bodily
form. So must a ghost or vision however objectively
;
unreal it may be, it must appear in the likeness of man,

and will usually have garments such as we have been
accustomed to associate with human beings; it must
appear in material accessories, or it could not appear
at That is the essence of revelation and even in
all. :
the most sublimated case, even if no outward form or

voice were subjectively constructed, yet something in

the brain must be affected, else not only could there be
neither speech nor language, there could not be any
definite impression, not even the vanishing impression
of a dream.
But the materialising tendency of the human race
has gone farther than that. Given the incarnation of
a divine spirit in a mortal frame, they have not been
content with that already sufficiently difficult idea;
they have pressed further to ask how
body was
that
produced, and what ultimately became of it; and so
we have legends of abnormal birth and of bodily
resurrection.
But the latter difficulty is not a problem raised by
the phenomena associated with Christ alone; it is a
difficulty which has troubled all humanity. are We
all supposed to be spirits endowed with immortality,
as taught the ancients; but we all have bodies the —

apparently necessary medium of manifestation and of
individuality, —
what becomes of them? Socrates was
content to suppose that the body remained behind,
sloughed off, and was restored to the elements of this
material world. But the early Christians were not
satisfied thus to get rid of their material part a vein :
of materialism ran through their Christianity; they

supposed that the bodies were only temporarily dis-
carded,and would ultimately rise and rejoin their di-
vorced spirits at the sound of some future signal: a
grotesque idea which, strange to ây, still survives in
the thoughts of unimaginative persons and in some
portions of the liturgy.
But, contended, this is an essential part of

it is
Christianity, however it be interpreted the mere per- ;
sistence of existence was a pagan idea and existed long

before Christ. The special feature of Christianity
was not the survival or persistence of existence, even
of individual existence, but the resurrection of the
body and hence this doctrine is rightly emphasised in
;
the creeds.
Moreover, the very basis of Christianity — ^the In-
carnation — emphasises and dignifies the perception
that man of both soul and body,
consists essentially
and that he is to be aided and raised and saved, not by
spiritual influences alone, but by agencies appeahng
to his senses and acting primarily upon his bodily or-
ganism.
It is the neglect of this truth which has often ren-
dered the evangehsing activity of religious bodies so
futile. They haAê tried to save souls alone. They
are growing wiser now, and are beginning to reahse
that once bodily conditions are set fairly right, peo-
ple's souls are much better than has been credited;
there is a lot of innate goodness in humanity, and to
enable it to blossom and flourish it needs Kttle more
than the material care which is lavished upon the
plants in the garden. They themselves do the flower-
—
ing and fruiting, the gardener has only to expose
them to sun and air to keep them clear of parasites
and weeds.
And so, throughout, it will be found that Christi-
anity has a definitely materialistic side and it becomes
;
a question for us what is to be the modern interpreta-
II
tion of all the singularly developed mediseval doc-

trine, and how far it is to be accepted as in any sense
corresponding to reality. For that it is not to be ac-
cepted in a crude form, such as that in which it is
preached by ignorant persons to-day, was obvious to

the New Testament writers, and doubtless to the most
enlightened saints of all time; but that it contains
some element of truth, enshrined in its strange form-
alism is to be strongly maintained.
The purely spiritual side of religion, so far as it
contents itself with positive assertion and is not oc-
cupied with denying material facts, does not now con-
cern us. It is the material side which I wish to con-
sider, especially whether religion should have a ma-
terialistic basis, and how far its excursion into ma-
terialism may be warranted by experience. It is
plain that for our present mode of apprehending the

universe a material vehicle is essential; that which has
no contact with the world of matter cannot be di-

rectly apprehended, and has for us no effective exist-
ence. Apurely spiritual agency may be active and
the activity may be guessed at or inferred, and may
be believed in, but the only evidence of its existence
that can be adduced is the manifestation of that ac-
tivity through matter, and the only moments when a
glimpse can be caught of the activity are the moments
at which action on matter occurs.
Dreams, visions, thoughts, inspirations, all things —
known to us, no matter how intangible and. subtle
their essence —
are enabled to enter what we call our
present consciousness solely by some action on, or ac-
tion in, the brain. They may act on other material

particles too, but on the matter of the brain they must
act, or they give no sign.
A whole world may exist beyond our senses, may
exist even in space and close to us for all we can tell,
and yet if it has no means of connexion, no links with
the material world, it must remain outside our con-
sciousness; and this isolation must last until we grow
a new sense, or otherwise develop fresh faculties, so
that intercommunication and interaction can begin.
Whether there is any interaction at present between
this and a supersensual world is a question that may
be debated, but the above assertion that some such
interaction is an essential preliminary to our recogni-
tion of such a world is hardly susceptible of debate.
Now, dependence of the spiritual on a vehicle
this
for manifestation is not likely to be a purely tempor-
ary condition: it is probably a sign or example of

something which has an eternal significance, a repre-
sentation of some permanent truth.
That is certainly the working hypothesis which,
until negatived, we ought to make. Our senses limit
us, but do not deceive us: so far as they go, they tell
us the truth. I wish to proceed on that hypothesis.
To suppose that our experience of the necessary and
fundamental connexion between the two things the —
something which we know as mind and the something
which is now represented by matter has no counter-—
part or enlargement in the actual scheme of the uni-
verse, as it really exists, is needlessly to postulate con-
fusion and instrumental deception.
Philosophers have been so impressed with this that

they have conjectured that mind and matter are but
aspects, or modes of perception, of one fundamental
comprehensive unity a unity which is neither exactly
;
mind nor exactly matter as we conceive them, but is

something fundamental and underlying both, as the
ether is now conceived of as sustaining and in some
sense constituting all the phenomena of the visible
universe.
This monistic view, if true at all, is likely to be per-
manently and actually true; and, though it by no
means f ollovv^s that mind is dependent on matter as we
know it, it will probably be still by means of something
—
akin to matter something which can act as a Aê-
hicle and represent it in the same sort of way that
matter represents it now —that it will hereafter be
manifested.
This probability or possibility may be regarded as
one form of statement of an orthodox Christian doc-
trine. Assuming that Christianity emphasises the
material aspect of religion, as its supporters assert that
it does, supplements the mere survival of a discar-
it
nate spirit, a homeless wanderer or melancholy ghost,

with the warm and comfortable clothing of something
that may legitimately be spoken of as a "body"; that
is to say, it postulates a supersensually visible and tan-
gible vehicle or mode of manifestation, fitted to sub-
serve the needs of future existence as our bodies sub-
serve the needs of terrestrial life — an ethereal or other
entity constituting the persistent "other aspect," and
fulfilling some of the functions which the atoms of

terrestrial matter are employed to fulfil now.
Not only the authority of St. Paul, but the influ-
ence also of poets, can be appealed to as sustaining
some truth underlying the crude idea above formu-
lated. To them the highest feelings have, and appear
necessarily to have, a material outcome or counterpart
associated with them. Take "love," for instance:
many have been the attempts to spiritualise it into a
discarnate entity; and doubtless it is in its highest
form the purest and least gross of all the emotions;
yet it must ultimately be recognised that it has a sac-
ramental or material side, wherein the flesh and the
spirit are united and inseparable, and where neither
can be discarded without loss to the other. It has been
always easy to deride and condemn the bodily side of
our nature, but by the highest seers this has not been
done. The glorification and transfiguration, not the
reprobation, of the body has been the theme of the
highest prophets and poets, and those who in "matter"
detect nothing but evil are^ essential, though well-
meaning, blasphemers. It has been easy also to tilt
the balance the other way, and, by discarding or ig-
noring the spiritual side, to wallow and blaspheme in a
far more degraded and degrading manner. This
tendency in times of decadence has been dominant,
and nations and individuals have had to struggle with
the overweight of their animal ancestry, and some
have succumbed but, shorn of its exaggeration, there
;
is a truth to be perceived on the material side too, and

we must be careful that in spurning the exaggeration
we do not lose some of the essential truth embodied in

it. In so far as the mis-called "fleshly school of poet-
ry," for instance, is not fleshly in any low sense, but
inspired, the permanence and importance and dignity
of the side now known as material is the truth which is
being preached/ It may happen that in some cases
the message is too dazzling for the messenger, and he
may succumb to the enchantment of his vision, so that
he lose the jewel itself and be left blindly grasping
only its empty setting but the message itself must not
;
be unduly discredited on that account.

Assuming then —as consonant with, or even as part
of, Christianity— the doctrine of the dignity and nec-
essary character of some quasi-material counterpart
of every spiritual essence, it becomes our duty to in-
quire what part of this connexion is essential, and
what is accidental and temporary.
Take our present incarnation as an example. We
display ourselves to mankind in the garb of certain
clothes, artificially constructed of animal and vegeta-
ble materials, and in the form of a certain material or-
ganism, put together by processes of digestion and as-
similation, likewise composed of terrestrial materials.
The identity of the corporeal substances and chemi-
cal compounds is evidently not of a permanent and
important character. Whether they formed part of
sheep or birds or fish or plants, they are assimilated
1 I regret to have to refer, even for the sake of iUustration, to
this discredited and noxious criticism of the poetry of Rossetti, but I
hope that the lofty character of the thing criticised is sufficiently manifest
to enable every reader to perceive the beauty of the message and tlie
inspiration of the poet

—
and become part of us, being arranged by our sub-

conscious activities and vital processes into appropri-
ate form, just as truly as other materials are con-
sciously woven into garments, no matter what they or-
iginally sprang from. Moreover, just as our clothes
wear out and require darning and patching, so our
bodies wear out; the particles are in continual flux;
each giving place to others, and being constantly dis-
carded and renewed. The identity of the actual or
instantaneous body is therefore an affair of no impor-
tance the individuality lies deeper than that, and be-
:
longs to whatever it is which put the particles together

in this shape and not another.
II. The Resurrection of the Body

When, therefore, at what we call death, this con-
trolling entity leaves the terrestrial sphere of things
assuming that it does not promptly go out of exist-
ence, a thing which it would be very surprising for
any existing entity to do —
unnecessary to suppose
it is
that it will continue in a wholly discarnate condition

for a time, until presently it becomes able to resume
the poor decayed refuse which it left behind on this
planet.
The idea of rejoining the corpse in this sense is un-
thinkable and repulsive : it could only arise in ages of
ignorance. The identity of the material particles
does not constitute the identity of the person, nor is
it essential to the identityof the body. What is

wanted to make definite our thoughts of the persistent
existence of what we call our immortal part, is simply
the persistent power of manifesting itself to friends,
i.e. to persons with whom we are in sympathy, by

means and substantial in that order of ex-
as plain
istence as the —
body was here ^though the manifesta-
tion need not be of so broadcast and indiscriminate a
—
character as it is now ;^ we may surmise that any im-
mortal part must have the power of constructing for
itself a suitable vehicle of manifestation which is the
essentialmeaning of the term "body."
The question whether the individuality and personal
identity and consciousness and memory, and all that
constitutes an ego, are preserved, is worthy of exami-
nation and research the fate of the terrestrial residue
;
is of no great consequence —not much more than if it

consisted solely of old clothes.
To those who stigmatise this as dualism, and say
that it is contrary to the ultimate identity of matter
and spirit, I reply No. Monism does not assert that
atoms of matter are any aspect of me. The pen-
holder is an instrument subservient to my will, and it
may be made to express my thought, but it is no part
—
of me I can throw it down when done with, and
when worn out I can burn or bury it, but I do not
1 This sentence probably requires amplification: its meaning is this
— Present human bodies bring us into contact with strangers and make
us aware of people in whom perchance we take no interest. Hereafter
our acquaintanceship may perhaps be limited to those with whom we
—
are linked by ties of affinity and affection the mode of communication
being probably of a more sympathetic or telepathic character, and less
physical, than now. If so, this planetary episo<le is a great opportunity
lor enlarging our sympathies and for making new friends; so that the
emphasis laid by great ])rophets on "love," and their condemnation of
selfishness as a deadly vice specially destructive of fulness of person-
ality and wealth of existence, becomes amply intelligible.
thereby lose the power of taking another, nor of learn-

ing to write with a different instrument and in another
language if I travel to other countries. There may-
be a sense in which all matter is evidence of, and an
aspect of, the thought of some World-]\Iind ; but
most of it is certainly neither evidence nor aspect of
my mind. Matter divorced from all JNIind whatever
may possibly thereby cease to exist ; but the furniture
certainly does not cease to exist when I leave the room,
—nor would it be affected if all humanity were to
perish off the planet.
Those who press monism to these absurd lengths
will find a difficulty in preserving the clearness of
their thoughts and in self-defence they will take ref-
;
uge narrow and illiterate and most unscientific

in a
variety of dogmatic scepticism, or agnostic dogma-
tism.
Soul and Body

The phrase "resurrection of the body" undoubtedly
dates back to a period when it was thought that the
residue laid in the grave would at some future signal
be collected and resuscitated and raised in the air and :
superstitions about missing fragments and about the

permissibility of cremation, even to this day, are not
extinct. But and has long
all this is clearly infantile,
been discarded by leaders of thought; and it were

good if the phrases responsible for the misunderstand-
ing could be amended also.
"Resurrection of a body" would be but little im-
provement, for the body that hereafter "shall be" is
not that body which was planted in the ground; and

the future "body" can hardly be said to have risen
from the grave. Nor does the Nicene version "resur-
rection of the dead" give much assistance, for that
which survives is just that which never was dead; it
did not cease to be, and then arise to new life ; its ex-
istence, if persistent at all, is necessarily continuous;
the whole argument for persistence of existence de-
—
pends on continuity, on the fact that real existence
does not suddenly spring into being out of nothing,
and then suddenly vanish as if it had not been.
Perhaps the word "resurrection" may be interpreted
as meaning revival or survival; and "death" can be de-
fined as a separation between the psychical and physi-
cal aspects of an individual, and as a definite physico-
chemical process occurring to the body or material
vehicle of manifestation. So far as the undying es-
sence or spirit is concerned the teaching of Socrates
holds to this day: "Let them bury him if they could
catch him; but he himself would be out of their reach."
It is all very well to stigmatise this as pagan teach-
ing, and to hold it in light esteem, —
it is teaching to
which multitudes to-day have not risen and a real and ;
vital belief in such a doctrine could not but have a be-

neficent influence on conduct. It may be true to say
Christianity assumes all that, and supplements it with
the Pauline doctrine of a resurrection-body, or spirit-
ual body; — it does, but it is likewise true that the
phrases of the Church do not assist people to grasp
even the truth underlying the Socratic doctrine of im-
mortality, and so, when they perceive the falsity of
:
corporeal resurrection, they are apt to lose faith even

in persistence of existence. Having been accustomed
to associate personality with a buried corpse, the mani-
fest decay and dissipation of the body destroys, in the
semi-educated, the whole idea of immortality and with ;
it is apt to go religion too. "Resurrection" is itself
a misleading word : the phrases which suggest that the

person himself is entombed, the phrases about wait-
ing till the last day, and about the general resurrec-
tion, even the habit of burying \\Tith the face to the
east, and the custom of burying relatives together, are
all misleading or are liable to misinterpretation.
Some of these customs are legitimate and humanly
intelligible; and so strong a hold have these ideas on
mankind, that even the greatest poets, who have
shaken themselves loose from the thought, cannot, and
possibly do not wish to, shake themselves loose from
the time-honoured language in which it was embedded,
for even Tennyson says
"in the vast Cathedral leave him."
But God forbid that I should presume to pragma-

tise or dogmatise as to the language w^hich ought to
be employed: let us get our thoughts clear, and the
language of devotion and of poetry may continue to
be employed in due season. Words and ancient
phrases can touch the emotions, as music can, without
being too closely scrutinised by the intellect; the for-
mulae of centuries must be respected, and a priggish
precision of expression may be quite unsuited to wor-
ship.
III. The Resurrection of Christ
Let us then, in a spirit of orthodoxy, now approach

the person of Christ —the Christ long recognised by
Christendom as a Divine Person in human form: let
us assume that in order to display himself to the in-

habitants of this planet he was provided with a body
like our own, eating and drinking and sleeping and
suffering and dying like any of us: what should we
—
expect to happen to his body the body of Jesus of
—
Nazareth when it was done with?
That he should survive death, that he should be able
to appear to worshippers, that he would exert a peren-
nial and vivifying influence on his disciples of all time
— orthodox, and all this is not repugnant to
all this is
science as I conceive it. Is anything more necessary?

That a historial legend should have grown up con-
cerning the disappearance of the body from a tomb is
almost inevitable, considering the state of belief at the
time. If an apparition of someone recently deceased
appeared now to ignorant people, I imagine that most
of them would expect the corpse to have been utilised
for the purpose, and to have been either temporarily
or permanently disturbed in its grave. And to dis-
prove a continued existence it might be held sufficient,
among ignorant people, to point triumphantly to a
tomb not empty.
But, then, Christ by ecclesiastical hypothesis was
unique: he was not as one of us, his appearance was
likely to transcend ours, and his body was likely to be
—
differently constituted from ours : so it has been main-

tained.
I think it may
be argued that, thus conceived, the
Incarnation would hardly sustain the complete and
efficient character which orthodox creeds claim for it.
The whole idea of the Manhood is that he was a man
like ourselves, subject to human needs, open even to
temptation, obedient to pain and death. That his
spirit was superior to ours few deny, but that his body
was essentially different I confess seems to me like
superstition. His raiment at any rate was made in
the ordinary way, yet it too shared in the glory of the
transfiguration. The Transfiguration was a splendid
episode, typifying the dignifying and dominating of
matter by the indwelling spirit. The shining in the
eye of genius, the almost visible glow pervading the
body in moments of exaltation, this, raised to a higher
power, permeated and suffused the poor human body
and travel-worn peasant garments of Christ, till the
few privileged witnesses had to shade their eyes.
So it is reported concerning Moses after his solitary
communion with Jehovah; so it may have been with
Joan of Arc; so it may be again from time to time
with the most exalted saints. These things are le-
gends, it is but they are more than legends they
true, ;
bear on their face the signs of hyperphysical truth

not in detail of narration, perhaps, but in essence. So
it was with Saul's vision at Damascus; so it may have
been with the scene at the Baptism; so, it is not in-

conceivable, may there be some foundation of truth
:
even for the legendary appearances to JMagi and to

shepherds at the Nativity.
The mental and the physical are so interwoven, the
possibilities of clairvoyance are so unexplored, that I
do not feel constrained to abandon the traditional idea
that the coming or the going of a great personality
may be heralded and accompanied by strange oc-
currences in the region of physical force. The mind
of man is competent to enchain and enthrall the forces
of nature, and to produce strange and weird effects
that would not otherwise have occurred. Shall the
power be limited to his conscious intelMgence? May
it not also be within the power of the subconscious in-
telligence, at moments of ecstasy, or at epochs of

strong emotion or of transition?
That there should be storms and earthquakes at the
Crucifixion is sure to be legendary, but that it was
likewise true is not in the least inconceivable. We
know too little to be able to dogmatise on such things
we must observe and generalise as we can.
Hence if the historical evidence is strong and de-
finite for the disappearance, not of bodies from tombs,
but of that one Body from —the exception
its tomb
being on the ground of
justified having been
its in-
habited by an exceptionally mighty Spirit —I am not
one to seek to deny the on scientific
possibility
grounds. I will only say that the proof of material
resurrection or resuscitation adduced in the Gospel is
not such as will bear scrutiny: it offers no case what-
ever to the Society for Psychical Research. If the
'
«68 SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY
stone and the seal and the watch had been found in-
tact, and yet the tomb empty, there would have been
something to investigate. But to find the place aban-
doned, and the stone rolled away, is equivalent to find
the grave rifled no question of dematerialisation need
:
arise. But surely that is not what should be meant by

Christian Resurrection I submit that for the purposes
:
of religion at the present day no exceptional treat-

ment of the discarded human body is necessary; and
the difiiculties introduced by the effort to contemplate
the circumstances of anything approaching physical
resuscitation, or re-employment of the same body, are
very great.
The Appearances during the Forty Days are not
inconsistent with the legends of apparitions the world
over; and a farewell phantasmal appearance des- —
—
cribed as an Ascension is credible enough. The
presence of the wounds also is quite consistent with
what is observable in apparitions as known to us they :
by no means establish physical identity. The body

notoriously had not its old properties, for it appeared
and disappeared and penetrated walls and ultimately
;
this supposed compound of terrestrial particles as-

cended into another order of things, "and sat down
for ever at the right hand of God." We
are out of
the region of physics here, and attention to the details
of any material body in such an atmosphere introduces
strangely inappropriate considerations the very atoms
:
of which it was composed would not last for ever, the

chemical compounds would soon decay: surely we
need not assert such a thing of the body which was
:
buried in the tomb, any more than we assert it of the

four or five previous bodies which, during the Incar-
nation, had been worn and discarded, particle by par-
ticle.
Moreover, it is depressing to the ordinary Christian,

who knows or ought to know that his own flesh, bones,
and other appurtenances will assuredly not rise, to
have to think of Christ's Resurrection as a unique
occurrence; for the express Pauline doctrine of the
Resurrection is that it is the type or pattern of our
resurrection; and the more normally we can regard
the human side of Christ, and everything connected
with his body both before and after death, the better
and more hopeful is it for us his brethren.
May I suggest that the mystical spirit, which is the
vital essence of any church or religious fellowship,
though it may be incarnate for a time in a creed,
should not be for ever fossilised therein, but should
continue open to the fertilising influences of reason
and expanding kowledge, and, like any other spirit,
should dominate and survive its material body.
SUMMARY OF CHAPTER XII

Lest it be thought that a wholesome and proper in-
gredient of materialism as an element in Christianity
has been in this chapter attacked, let me try to make
plainer the balanced position taken or intended by at-
tempting a summary of its main points. Its conten-
tions are as follows
1. That Christianity is an intermediate and unify-
ing religion, between the extremes of spiritualism on

the one hand and materialism on the other; and that
the whole idea of a divine Incarnation as well as many
of the miracles and the sacraments, can be regarded
as expressive of this comprehensive character.
2. That the correspondence or connexion between
matter and spirit, as now known, is probably a symbol

or sample of something permanently true, so that a
double aspect of every fundamental existence is likely
always to continue; but that the supposed necessary
and perpetual dependence of the human spirit on ordi-
nary chemical terrestrial matter, for its manifestation
and activity, is illusory and superstitious. 1 Cor. xv,
49, 50.
3. That not only persistence of existence but full
retention of personality and individuality can be con-
ceived, without the hypothesis of retention of any
particles of terrestrial matter ; of person
since identity
in no way depends upon identity of particles even
now.
That the real meaning of the term "body" should
4.
be explained and emphasised as connoting anything

which is able to manifest feehngs, emotions, and
thoughts, and at the same time to operate efficiently
on its environment. The temporary character of the
present human body should be admitted for purposes
of religion; although it usefully and truthfully dis-
plays the incarnate part of us during the brief episode
of terrestrial life. Job. xix, 26.
That the incarnation of Divine Spirit called
5.
Christ revealed to humanity certain aspects of Deity
.J
in a unique degree ; but the more akin to ordinary hu-

manity the human side of Christ can be considered,
themore luminous is the teaching, and the better for
the hold of Christianity upon the race. 1 Cor. xv, 16.
6. One of the lessons to be learned is the poten-
tialityof the Divine latent in all humanity and this is :
displayed both in its freedom to rebel and in its power

of indispensable and filial service. John x, 30, 35.
7. That the spread of scepticism and dogmatic ag-
nosticism is largely due to the attempted maintenance
of incredible and materiahstic dogmas by the ortho-
dox; to the comparative neglect of the essential, the
spiritual, and the practical.
8. That materialism of an untransfigured and un-
glorified description is out of place in religion, but
that the right kind of materialism is in place. For the

mystical or sacramental use of earthly materials is
helpful, though there always comes a point at which
they cease to be expressive. An attempt to press them
beyond their significant point leads to impossible de-
tails, and becomes indistinguishable from fidgetting
and worrying superstition, unworthy of an emanci-

pated and Affiliated race.
9. That the salvation offered by Christianity is of
—
the whole man body and soul together and that —
this fact is the supreme justification for energetic
practical effort in rectifying social abuses, in improv-
ing social conditions, and securing to people generally
a fair opportunity for a decent and honourable life.
:
CHAPTER XIII
THE DIVINE ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY
IV. Christianity and History
AS a physicist
sible to
my desire go out as far as pos-
is to
meet theologians on their approach to
the camp of physical science; for it is generally far
more useful to discover points of possible agreement
than to emphasise points of difference. To my com-
rades in science I would point out that the leading men
among orthodox Christians now set us a good ex-
ample, since they no longer seem to desire to interpose
any insuperable protest against overhauling from time
to time the material and historical assertions associated
with Christianity, and discarding those which cannot
be established as facts. Discarding, that is to say,
those which do not satisfy one at least of two criteria
or conditions that of being well evidenced historically
:
on the one hand, and that of satisfying or being felt

of an individual
essential to spiritual aspiration, either
or of a church or fellowship on the other. If I am
right in this understanding, I am willing to accept the
criteria suggested, without further criticism, and have
pleaded in the foregoing pages for the gradual re-
consideration of certain traditional tenets, on the
grounds
272
;
DIVINE ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 273
(a) That they are not of a nature to be well ev-

idenced historically (to say more than that
would imply that I regarded myself as a
competent historical critic)
(b) That they are not edifying to people at any
reasonable intellectual level; while as to
higher spiritual aspiration, it is independent
of them.
It is satisfactory that culture and learned theolog-

ians of the present day profess themselves ready to
welcome dogmas in which no doubt they
criticism of
personally believe and we can now shortly proceed to
;
the more positive or constructive division of our sub-

ject.
Meanwhile it is reasonable to accept the historic
Christ, as represented in the Gospel, together with the
general account given of his teachings. In so far as
the record —and even without any
is not accurate
knowledge of we must admit that
biblical criticism it
isbound be inaccurate —we may be sure that the

to
record is likely to be inferior to the reality, that the
report of the teachings may have
been spoiled and
garbled in places but is not likely to have been im-
proved. Some of these spoilings may have been due
to misunderstanding, others to a desire for extra edifi-
cation; and it is difficult to say which attitude of a
transcriber is the more dangerous.
Asimilar view, however, may be held concerning
the record of the words of any astounding genius;
his contemporaries and immediate successors are not
likely to improve upon his teachings: even as mere

commentators they may exliibit well-intentioned stu-
pidity; but, if they have to act also as reporters,
omission eked out by exaggeration must be prominent,
and unconscious misrepresentation is bound to occur.
But now we may surely go
in the case of Christ
much farther we may admit his inspiration in an ex-
;
traordinary sense, and may accept the general con-

sensus of Christendom as testifying to his essentially
divine character in other words, he
: must perceive that
he has revealed to the inhabitants of this planet some
of the sahent features of Godhead to an altogether
exceptional extent.
He displays, in fact, attributes wliich many persons
understand and signify when they use the word
"God": so much so, that they call him by the name of
the Spirit which he reveals."^ He does not display all
—
the known attributes of God not those studied in
Natural Theolog}^ for instance, but he exhibits —
those which are most important to poor struggling
humanity, and those which by their very simplicity and
naturalness might otherwise have been overlooked by
the human race, or stigmatised as too hopelessly an-
thropomorphic. The attributes of Fatherhood, for in-
stance, strongly and simply reahsed, constitute one
revelation; the effective combination, or even identi-
fication, of love of God with service of neighbour,
constitutes another; and there is, it seems to me, an
1 The statement that the Christ depicted in the gospels is God, is a
statement illustrative of our conception of Godhead, and not really an
explanatory statement concerning Christ: we cannot define or explain
the known in terms of the unknown.
even bolder conception of Deity suggested, in the

dramatic parable "the child in the midst," of which I
fancy we have but an abbreviated version.
The only place where we find it necessary to hesi-
tate, and perhaps to remonstrate, is on the material-
istic side of orthodox Christianity —
the place where
the ordinary phenomena of nature enter into the doc-
trines, and are more or less associated or incorporated
with them. Here it is natural to plead for more elas-
tic treatment, and here alone do I imagine that the
modern mind can see farther and walk more securely
than the mediaeval mind it is possible that in the light
;
of accumulated knowledge it can in some respects

see more clearly than even the saints and prophets of
the past.
It has been the perennial glory of Christianity that
itcan adapt itself to all conditions of men and to all
changing periods of time; but it has done so always
by modification of the non-essential the spirit and es-
:
sence have preserved their identity; the accidentals,

in Judaea, in ancient Rome, in mediaeval Germany, in
—
modern England and America, the accidentals have
been different.
But throughout, it will be said, certain of the ma-
terial aspects have preserved their continuity and
identity unchanged. Some of the miracles, especially
the physical details supposed to accompany, or by
some even to constitute, the Incarnation and the
Resurrection, have never been doubted by Christians.
Until recently, I agree, no, not to any great extent;
but half a century ago they were seriously doubted
— ;
^76 SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY
by the people who thereby felt themselves outside the

flock, but who in all practical details of Hfe and con-
duct were as good as —
well, were comparable with
orthodox Christians. The disbelief went, in my judg-
ment, too far it extended itself to some of the spirit-
:
—
ual teachings ^those concerning prayer, for instance
and it threw needless doubt upon some phenomena,
such as those referred to in the last chapter, which
may after all have been facts. Whether it went too
far or not, an atmosphere of disbelief became preva-
lent; and it was generated by the persistence of the
faithful in certain material statements which to an
age of more knowledge had become incredible. The
extreme excursion of the pendulum has subsided now,
but it is still swinging, and when it settles down it will
not occupy precisely the same place as it did before
the oscillation began. The swing was caused by a
shifting of the fulcrum or point of support, and only
the bob has been visible. So it has become our duty to
determine how much and in what direction the real
pivot of the pendulum has been effectively moved, and
to realise that that is the position which will be taken
by the oscillating mass of opinion when present dis-
turbances have subsided. Those, if there be any, who
think that it can ever go back permanently to a pre-
nineteenth-century position, or to a position deter-
mined by the first six or any other past centuries, are
assuredly mistaken.
We shall now endeavour to arrive at a closer ap-
preciation of what the essence of Christianity really
is; jSrst, however, recollecting what it has been con-

sidered to be by all sorts and conditions of men.
V. Varieties of Christianity
Christianity is a word of wide significance, and it
is not easy to attach to it a definite meaning. It is
clear that as it exists among us it has many phases,

which may be grouped around five or six principal
typesc
1. First there is evangelical or spiritual Chris-
tianity, usually associated with the name of Paul,
which seeks to emphasise a forensic scheme of salva-
tion,and to link itself on to the Hebraistic and Hel-
lenistic ideas of blood and vicarious sacrifice. Salva-
tion by Atonement is the central feature
faith in the
of this scheme, and right conduct is a secondary
though natural sequel to right belief and to trust in
what by Divine mercy has been already fully accom-
pHshed; so that no "performance" is necessary for
salvation, but only assimilation of the sacrifice and
oblation of Christ, once and for ever accomplished.
This variety of Christianity aims at attending to
the spiritual aspect only,and despises the material it ;
rejects the intervention of men and of material aids;

it mistrusts the use of music and ornament, and it
endeavours, sometimes with poor success, to condemn

the beauty of this present world in comparison with
the glory that shall be revealed; even the sacraments
it is inclined to minimise, and to regard them as me-
morial services helpful to the spirit, rather than as
agencies of real and present efficacy achieving some-

thing otherwise unattainable. Definite historical fact
is of supreme importance to this variety of belief for ;
if that be taken away the basis of faith is under-

mined, and the system totters to destruction.
2. Next there is ecclesiastical or dogmatic Chris-
tianity, usually associated with the name of Peter,
which is apt to emphasise the efiicacy of ceremonies,
to regard material actions and priestly offices as essen-
tial to salvation, and to insist not only on their sym-
bolic interpretation, but on some actual physical
transformation, some bodily or material efficacy. It
builds less upon an historic past, and more upon a
present virtue residing in the Church, or accessible to
and utilisable by the proper officers and dispensers
of the means of grace. It feels the importance of
times and seasons and buildings and sensuous repre-
sentation; it is apt to concentrate attention on eccles-
iastical details, with a zest for minutiae, which, when
compared with the vital issues at stake, strikes an out-
sider as rather pathetically humourous; and it some-
times so elaborates the material acts of worship, such
as the sacraments, that they tend to take on the nature
of incantation, and are occasionally performed by the
priest alone, the congregation passively sharing in
their mysterious and miraculous virtue.
3. Then there is the practical and energetic form of
Christianity, usually associated with the name of
James, which emphasises the virtue of good works
and the importance of conduct, which regards belief
and doctrine as of secondary importance, which seeks
no cloistered virtue, but throws itself vigorously into

social movement, and endeavours both by word and
deed to serve the brethren, and by active charity to
ameliorate the lot of those whom it thinks of as
Christ's poor.
4. Yet another variety is the mystical or emotional
form of Christianity, usually associated with the
name of John, which seeks by rapt adoration and
worship of the Redeemer and love of all whom he has
called his brethren
—"even the least of these my
brethren," — of spiritual contem-
to rise to the height
plation and ecstasy tending somewhat in this its high
:
quest to isolate itself from the world, in order to lose

itself inan anticipation of heaven.
5. There exists also, one must admit, some trace of
what may be called governing or hierarchical Chris-
tianity, which glorifies the priestly office, which seeks
after temporal power, which regards the material
prosperity of the Church as of more importance than
the welfare of states and peoples, which joins hands
with autocratic rulers for the oppression of the poor,
which blesses and sustains violence, so it be used
against the Church's enemies, which banishes and ex-
—
communicates the saints even those of its own house-
hold, —and by corruption of the best succeeds in abet-
ting the cause of the worst. This is the kind of Chris-
tianity which attracts tlie special notice of sceptics and
scoffers; and most of the diatribes of good men
against Christianity and the Christian ideal are
based u])on some confused apprehension of this
ghastly and blasphemous travesty.
Whether it exists, here and there, in this country it
is not for me to say, but it certainly has some existence
in that country which must some day pass through

the throes of an ultimately beneficent revolution — ^the
country whose Church has excommunicated Tolstoi,

and whose late Procurator of Holy Synod, in fur-
therance of what he conceived as legitimate ecclesias-
ticalaggrandisement, exhorted the Czar to folly and
wickedness in terms of fulsome and superstitious
adulation.
6. Lastly and ostensibly the base of all these varie-
ties —but how from some of them, ^there is
different —
the Christianity particularly exemplified and taught
by that Syrian Carpenter, during his three years of
public service, before his execution as a criminal blas-
phemer. The name of that gentle and pathetic figure
has been used by the greater part of the Western
world ever since, sometimes to sanctify enterprises
of pity and tenderness, sometimes to cloak miser-
able ambitions, sometimes as a mere garment of
respectabihty.
Whatever view we may take of this Personahty, we
can most of us recognise it as the greatest that has yet
existed on this planet; hence, if it is through human
nature that we can gradually grow to some dim con-
ception of the majesty of the Eternal, it is the life
and teachings of that greatest Prophet that we shall
do well to study dihgently when we wish to disen-
tangle and display some of the secrets of the spiritual
universe; and, by the words have always
saints, his
been recognised as the highest yet spoken on earth
concerning the relations between man and man and

between man and God. It is certain that only a few
of his utterances are contained in our documentary
records, and it is probable that some of them have
been mutilated and spoiled in transmission neverthe- ;
less it is of interest to take those recorded words and

see how far they countenance the various schemes or
types of Christianity which have been based upon
them. And in particular I wish to select those
which seem to strengthen the case for either a partly
material or a purely spiritual interpretation of
Christianity.
First, to clear away the blasphemous use of Christ's
name in association with political or temporal or hier-
archical Christianity, the following will suffice:
"My kingdom is not of this world."
"Woe unto you, generation of vipers, that stoneth the prophets," etc.
"Ye make the commandments of God of none effect by your tradi-
tion."
There are many emphatic statements that religion

is peculiarly a spiritual affair:
In favour of a spiritual form of religion

"God is a spirit, and they that "The sabbath was made for
worship him ." . . man."
"Neither in this mountain nor "Meat ye know not of."
yet in Jerusalem ." . . "The kingdom of heaven is with-
"The words that I speak unto in you."
you they are spirit . . ." "Beware of the leaven of the
"That born of flesh is flesh, of Pharisees and Sadducees."
Bpirit is spirit." "It is the spirit that quickeneth.
"Ye make clean the outside of the flesh profiteth notliing."
the cup." "How is it that ye do not under-
"Pray in secret." stand?"
"Mint, anise, and cummin."
:
On the other hand, there are several texts which

appear to support material accessories:
In favour of a ceremonial and material form of re-

ligion
"This is mr body." "Eat the flesh of the Son of man
Baptism. "Suffer it to be so and drink his blood."
now." "Spit and touched his tongue."
"This kind goeth not out save Anointing eyes.
by prayer and fasting." (Ques- Wedding garment (otherwise in-
tionably genuine.) terpretable).
Breaking of bread and giving
thanks.
But the most numerous of the teachings have an

immediately practical bearing:
In favour of a practical form of religion

Grapes and thistles. Sower and seed.
Heal the broken-hearted, liberty Good Samaritan.
to captives, etc. "Casting out devils in thy name."
"Inasmuch as ye did it ." . . "Heareth and doeth."
"Go and seU all that thou hast." Tree known by fruit. "By their
"Worketh hitherto, and I work." fruits ye shall know them."
"^'ell done, good and faithful "They that have done good to
the resurrection of life," etc.
Do the will to know of the doc- "Not every one that saith Lord,
trine. Lord."
"Blessed is that servant who is Cup of cold water.
found so doing." "He that doeth the will of my
Fruitless tree cut down, Father, the same is my brother,"
"I was an hungered." etc.
"Gather them that do iniquity "This do and thou shalt live."
In many statements the human side of the Messiah

is specially emphasised
Emphasising the human side of Christ

"The Son can do nothing of himself.**
" I seek not mv own will."
DIVINE ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY tss
"Iam come in my Father's name."

"He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory."
"He hath given me a commandment what I should say."
"Son of man."
"Why callest thou me good?"
"Ye both know me and know whence I am."
"As the Father gave me commandment, even so I do."
(Statements emphasising the Divine side will be referred to later.)
A few texts, so far as they are genuine, can be ap-

pealed to as supporting ecclesiastical Christianity:
In favour of an ecclesiastical form of Christianity

"Keys of the kingdom of heaven."
"Sitting on twelve thrones judging," etc.
"Bind on earth shall be bound in heaven."
"If he refuses to hear the church, let him be," etc.
But it must be remembered that the frequency of

expressions which, though full of meaning, can hardly
be taken but were so strongly figurative that
literally,
even his Eastern associates were misled, is notorious:
Figurative expressions
"Hateth father and mother." "Let the dead bury their dead."
"Renounceth not all that he "Come to me and drink."
hath." "Whatsoever ye shall bind on
"Prophet cannot perish out of earth shall be bound in heaven."
Jerusalem." "Remove mountains."
"Let him sell his cloke and buy "Some standing here shall not
a sword." taste of death."
"Not to give peace but a "Keys of kingdom of heaven."
sword." "Bread of life."
Camel through needle's eye. "Born again."
" Sit on twelve thrones judging." "Destroy temple."
"Son coming in the clouds of "He that believeth is not
heaven." judged."
"This generation shall not pass "Eat my flesh and drink my
away." blood."
"I came not to judge the world." "Everlasting fire."
"This is my body."
—
If we endeavour to draw from all these texts a

general deduction concerning the kind of religion
intended and taught by the Founder of Christianity,
I cannot but feel that the balance inclines strongly in
the double direction of a spiritual interpretation on
the theoretical side, combined with a thoroughly prac-
ticaland simple outcome in daily life. These ele-
—
ments, the spiritual and the practical the worship of
God as a Spirit, and the service of man as a brother
are undoubted and emphatic constituents the warp —
—
and the woof, as it were of the pure Christian faith,
but it is difficult to maintain that they are uniquely
characteristic of it; even when taken together they
can hardly be said to constitute a feature which

sharply distinguishes it from all other religious
creeds. For a still more fundamental substratum or
—
framework for a perception of the really character-
istic and essential element in Christianity ^we must —
look away from the detailed wôrds and teachings and
contemplate the Life as a whole.
VI. EccE Deus

What, then, is the essential element in Christianity,
the essential theoretical element which inspires its
teachings on the ethical side? In the inculcation of

practical righteousness other noble religions must be
admitted to share, but there must be an element which
it possesses in excess above others —
some vital element
which has enabled it to survive all the struggles for
existence, and to dominate the most civilised peoples
of the world.
A religion is necessarily compounded of many es-

sences, and is sure to be mingled with foreign ingred-
ients, some worthy, some unworthy; but these acces-
sories cannot account for its vitality, for its adaptation
to various ages, and for its acceptance by all condi-
tions of men. A miraculous birth and resurrection
were certainly not distinctive of Christianity; they
have appeared in other religions too; we must look
for some feature specially characteristic and quite
fundamental.
I believe that the most essential element in Chris-
tianity is its conception of a human God; of a God,
in the first place, not apartfrom the universe, not out-
side and distinct from it but immanent in it; yet
it
not immanent only, but actually incarnate, incarnate

in it and revealed in the Incarnation.^ The nature of
God is displayed in part by everything, to those who
have eyes to see, but is displayed most clearly and
fully by the highest type of existence, the highest
experience to which the process of evolution has so
far opened our senses. By what else indeed can it
conceivably be rendered manifest? Naturally the

conception of Godhead is still only indistinct and par-
1 It may appccar hardly fair to treat the doctrine of Incarnation as
an intensification of the doctrine of Immanence; inasmuch as some may-
consider them ahnost antitiietic. Spinoza, for instance, held the one, but
would assuredly have eschewed the other. I do not disagree, but point
out that there is a tendency nowadays to strive rather towards a unifica-
tion of the two doctrines. It may be admitted that emphasis on the
philosophical notion of Immanence is comparatively recent on the part
of theologians; but it can hardly ever have been completely absent from
the Clirislian almosj)hcre, since St. Paul in his Athenian address clearly
lent it liis countenance, and it is implicit in the doctrine of the Logos,
but so far as we are as yet able to grasp it, we

tial,
must reach it through recognition of the extent and

intricacy of the and more particularly
cosmos,
through the highest type and loftiest spiritual devel-
opment of man himself.
This perception of a human God, or of a God in
the form of humanity is a perception which welds to-
gether Christianity and Pantheism and Paganism and
Philosophy. It has been seized and travestied by
Comtists, whose God is rather limited to the human
aspect instead of being only revealed through it. It
has been preached by some Unitarians, though rever-
ently denied by others and by Jews, who have felt
that God could not be incarnate in man: *'This be far
from thee. Lord." It has been recognised and even
exaggerated by Cathohcs, who have almost lost the
humanity in the Divinity, though they tend to restore
the balance by practical worship of the ^lother and
of canonical saints. But whatever its unconscious
treatment by the sects may have been, this idea the —
—
humanity of God or the Divinity of man I conceive
to be the truth which constituted the chief secret and
inspiration of Jesus: "I and the Father are one."
"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." "The
Son of Man," and equally "The Son of God." "Be-
fore Abraham was I am." "I am in the Father and
the Father in me." And though admittedly "My
Father is greater than I," yet "he that hath seen me
hath seen the Father"; and "he that believeth on me
hath everlasting life."
The world has been slow to grasp the meaning of
all this. The conception of Godhead formed by some

devout philosophers and mystics has quite rightly been
so immeasurably vast, though still assuredly utterly
inadequate and necessarily beneath reahty, that the
notion of a God revealed in human form — ^born, suf-
fering, tormented, killed —has been utterly incredible.

"A crucified prophet, yes; but a crucified God! I
shudder at the blasphemy," ^
yet that apparent blas-
phemy is the soul of Christianity. It calls upon us to
recognise and worship a crucified, an executed, God.
The genuine humanity of Christ is now manifest
and clear enough, though that too has been in danger
of being lost. There have been efforts to ignore it,
—
and many to confuse it attempts are still made to
regard him as unique, rather than as the first-fruits
of humanity, the first-born among many brethren.
Reahsation of the genuine and straightforward
humanity of Christ is obscured by a reverent misap-
prehension, akin in spirit to that which originated the
Arian denial of his divinity. Both modes of tliought
shrank amazed from the suggestion that God can be
really incarnate in, and manifested through, man: at
any rate, not in normal man; such a thing only be-
comes permissible and credible if the Man is abnormal
and unique, according to the orthodox view.
It is orthodox, therefore, to maintain that Christ's
birth was miraculous and his death portentous, that he
continued in existence otherwise than as we men con-
tinue, that his very body rose and ascended into
1 Kingsley's Hypfitia.
a
288 SCIENCE AXD CHRISTIANITY
heaven. —^whatever that collocation of words may

mean. But I suggest that such an attempt at excep-
tional gloriiication of his body is a pious heresy —
heresy which misses the truth lying open to our eyes.
His humanitv is to be recoomised as real and ordinarv
and thorough and complete not in mid<ile hf e alone,
:
but at birth and at death and after death. TVTiatever

happened to him may happen to any one of us, pro-
vided we attain the appropriate altitude: an altitude
which, whether within our individual reach or not, is
assuredly within reach of humanity. That is what

he urged again and again. "Be bom again." '"Be
ye perfect." "Te are the sons of Gk)d." ''My Father
and your Father, my God and your GkxL"
The ":
t::e^5 of the ordinary humanity of
:
Chiisi IS Li:.e iii>: and patent truth, masked only by

well-meaning and reverent superstition. But the sec-
—
ond truth is greater than that without it the first
would be meaningless and useless, if man alone, —
what gain have we The world is full of men. What
'
the world wants is a God. Behold the God I
The Divinity of Jesus is the truth which now re-

quires to be re-perceived, to be illumined afresh by
new knowledge, to be cleansed and revivified by the
wholesome flood of scepticism which has poured over
it; it can be freed now from all trace of grovelling
superstition, and can be recognised freely and enthus-

iastically: the Divinity of Jesus, and of all other noble
and saintly souls, in so far as they too have been in-
—
flamed by a spark of Deity in so far as they too can
be recognised as manifestations of the Divine. Xor
— ;
is iteven through man alone that the revelation comes,

though through man and the highest man it comes
chiefly the revelation is implicit in all the processes of
;
nature, and explicit too, so far as human vision, in

the person of its seers and poets and men of science,
has been as yet sufficiently cleared and strengthened
to perceive it.
For consider what is involved in the astounding idea

of Evolution and Progress as applied to the whole
universe. Either it is a fact or it is a dream. If it
be a fact, what an illuminating fact it is God is one
!
the universe is an aspect and a revelation of God.

The universe is struggling upward to a perfection not
yet attained. I see in the mighty process of evolution
an eternal struggle towards more and more self -per-
ception, and fuller and more all-embracing Existence
— not only on the part of what is customarily spoken
—
of as Creation but, in so far as Nature is an aspect
and revelation of God, and in so far as Time has any
ultimate meaning or significance, we must dare to
extend the thought of growth and progress and de-
velopment even up to the height of all that we can
realise of the Supernal Being. In some parts of the
universe perhaps already the ideal conception has
been attained; and the region of such attainment
—
the full blaze of self-conscious Deity is too bright
for mortal eyes, is utterly beyond our highest
thoughts; but in part the attainment is as yet very
imperfect; in what we know as the material part,
wliich is our present home, it is nascent, or only just
beginning; and our own struggles and efforts and
disappointments and aspirations —the

groaning felt
—
and travailing of Creation these are e\idence of the
effort, indeed they themselves are part of the effort,
towards fuller and completer and more conscious ex-
istence.^ On this planet man is the highest outcome
of the process so far, and is therefore the highest rep-
resentation of Deity that here exists. Terribly im-
perfect as yet, because so recently evolved, he is
nevertheless a being which has at length attained to

consciousness and free-mil, a being unable to be co-
erced by the whole force of the universe, against his
will; a spark of the Divine Spirit, therefore, never
more to be quenched. Open still to awful horrors, to
agonies of remorse, but to floods of joy also he per-
sists, and his destiny is largely in his own hands; he
may proceed up or dowTi, he may advance towards a
magnificent ascendancy, he may recede towards
depths of infamy. He is not coerced: he is guided
and influenced, but he is free to choose. The evil and
the good are necessary correlatives ; freedom to choose
the one involves freedom to choose the other.
So it must have been elsewhere, amid the depths of
cosmic space, myriads of times over in all the vistas
of the past and thus
; may have arisen legends of the
1 So, in Professor Gilbert Murray's version of "The Trojan women"
—
of Euripides, whose tragedies represent a parting of the ways between
—
an old theology and a new, the tortured Queen Hecuba turns from
the gods that know but help not, to the majesty of her own immeas-
urable grief, and in a moment of exalted vision perceives that even
through her sorrow life had somehow been enriched, and that though
Troy was burning and the race of Priam extinct, they had attained
immortality in ways undreamed of, and would add to the harmony of
the eternal music.
evolution of what are popularly called angels, some

ascendant in the struggle, others fallen by their own
rebellion. not be supposed that these instinctive
Let it
legends are based on nothing: they are a pictorial

travesty doubtless, but they are not gratuitous inven-
tions it is doubtful if entirely baseless or purely grat-
;
uitous inventions would have any vitality, every living

idea must surely be based upon something; these co'r-
respond to something innate in the ideas of humanity,
beciiuse embedded in the structure of the universe of
which that humanity is a part.
A question presses on the optimist for answer there-
fore : Are the rebellious and the sinful not also on the
up grade? Ultimately and in the last resort will not
tEly too put themselves in tune with the harmony of
existence? Who is to say? Time is infinite, eternity
is before us as well as behind us, and the end is not
yet. There is no "ultimately" in the matter, for there
isno end: there is room for an eternity of rebellion
and degradation and misery, as well as for one of joy
and hope and love. We can see that virtue and happi-
ness must be on the winning side, while crime is a
fruit of arrested development, or reversion to an an-
cestral type; we can perceive that vice contains sui-
cidal elements, while every step inan upward direction
increases the potential energy of the moral universe;
yet clearly there is to be no compulsion; the door of
hope is not closed, but it must of free-will be entered,
and good and evil will be intermingled with us for
many aeons yet. The law of progress by struggle and
effort is not soon to be abrogated and replaced by a
Nirvana of passive contemplation. There is too much

to do in this busy universe, and all must help. The
universe is not a "being" but a "becoming" an an- —
cient but light -bringing doctrine when reahsed, — it is
in change, in development, in movement, upward and

downward, that activity consists. A stationary condi-
tion, or stagnation, would to us be simple non-exist-
erfce; the element of progression, of change, of ac-
tivity, must be as durable as the universe itself. INIo-
notony, in the sense of absolute immobility, is un-
thinkable, unreal, and cannot anywhere exist: save
where things have ceased to be.
Such ideas, the ideas of development and progress,
extend even up to God Himself, according to the
Christian conception. So we return to that with which
we started: The Christian idea of God is not that of
a being outside the universe, above its struggles and
advances, looking on and taking no part in the pro-
cess, solely exalted, beneficent, self-determined and
complete; no, it is also that of a God who loves, who
yearns, who suffers, who keenly laments the rebellious
and misguided activity of the free agents brought
into being by Himself as part of Himself, who enters
into the storm and conflict, and is subject to condi-
tions as the Soul of it all; conditions not artificial and
transitory, but inlierent in the process of producing
free and conscious beings, and essential to the full
self -development even of Deity.
It is a marvellous and bewildering thought, but
whatever its value, and whether it be an ultimate reve-
lation or not, it is the revelation of Christ. Whether
—
DIVINE ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 29S
itbe considered blasphemous or not and in his own —

day it was certainly considered blasphemous this was —
the idea he grasped during those forty days of solitary
communion, and never subsequently let go.
This is the truth which has been reverberating down

the ages ever since; it has been the hidden inspiration
of saint, apostle, prophet, martyr, and, in however
dim and vague a form, has given hope and consola-
tion to the unlettered and poverty-stricken millions :
A God that could understand, that could suffer, that

could sympathise, that had felt the extremity of
human anguish, the agony of bereavement, had sub-
mitted even to the brutal hopeless torture of the inno-
cent, and had become acquainted with the pangs of
death, — this has been the chief consolation of the
Christian religion. This is the extraordinary concep-
tion of Godhead to which we have thus far risen.
"This is my beloved Son." The Christian God is re-
vealed as the incarnate spirit of humanity, or rather
the incarnate spirit of humanity is recognised as a real
intrinsic part of God. "The Kingdom of Heaven is
within you": —surely one of the most inspired utter-

ances of antiquity.
Infinitely patient the Universe has been while man
has groped his way to this truth: so simple and con-
soling in one of its aspects, so inconceivable and in-
credible in another. Dimly and partially it has been
seen by all and doubtless by many of
the prophets,
the pagan saints. Dimly and partially we see it now;
but in the life-blood of Christianity this is the most
vital element. It is not likely to be the attribute of
Îr
,^ 294
J?
SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY
any one religion alone, it may

be the essence of truth
in all terrestrial religions but it is conspicuously Chris-
tian. Its boldest statement was when a child was
placed in the midst and was regarded as a symbol of
the Deity; but was fore-shadowed even in the early
it
conceptions of Oljonpus, whose gods and goddesses

were affected with the passions of men; it is the root
fact underlying the superstitions of idolatry and all
varieties of anthropomorphism. "Thou shalt have
none other gods but me": and with dim eyes and dull
ears and misunderstanding hearts men have sought to
obey the commandment, seeking after God if haply
they might iind Him; while all the time their God
was very nigh unto them, in their midst and of their
fellowship sympathising with their struggles, rejoic-
ing in their successes, and evoking even in their own
poor nature some dim and broken image of Himself.
END
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Glass iliJyL..

Raymond: or Life and Death

NEW YORK: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

SIR OLIVER LODGE, LL.D., D.Sc, F.R.S,

NEW ^'VS^ YORK

FOBMEBLT PdBUSHED UnDEB THE TiTLB

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFATORY NOTE TO AMERICAN

chism for the use of Parents and Teachers, and both

deal with the interaction of Science and Theology

chapters emphasize both the Material element and the

SCIENCE AND FAITH

The Teachings of Orthodox Science and of Orthodox

Chapter 2. THE RECONCILIATION BETWEEN

CORPORATE WORSHIP AND SERVICE

Chapter 6. A REFORMED CHURCH AS AN ENGINE

Chapter 7. SOME SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS RE-

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

Chapter 9. Part II. THE PERMANENCE OF PER-

Chapter 11. SIN, SUFFERING, AND WRATH. . . 218

Chapter 13. Part II.THE DIVINE ELEMENT IN

THE OUTSTANDING CONTROVERSY

widely recognised at the present day that the

torical records, and reducing the region of the mirac-

of the benefit will always be that of a clearing and

allow that the highest Science and the truest Theology

gest that there is more nearly an orthodox science

upon which such an exalted must be

ence can become infused and suffused with immanent

not science as now understood. It is no more science

THE OUTSTANDING CONTROVERSY 5

a link in a chain of assured and reasoned knowledge

Minds which can habitually rise to it are, ipso facto^

knowledge into an atmosphere of faith.

that the atmosphere of modern science and the

as we are for our daily bread and future hopes, upon

necessity as the return of the seasons. The disper-

"Without the disturbance of a natural law, quite

1 From Fragments of Science, " Prayer and Natural Law."

Certain objections may be made to this statement

energy is needlessly dragged in when it has nothing

8 SCIENCE AND FAITH

did, we should not be debarred from approaching him

be rather a supine and fatalistic attitude if we were in

told, on v/hat they generally take to be good author-

nitely to disbelieve in physical interference of any

say, there is no perceptible trace. Even in the most

to Divine jealousy, nor would the threshing-floor of

the extinction of a fire ; but the religious formula for

finite wisdom Himself the soul of our dear

Take a scientific man who is a man of science, pure

conceived and precisely formulated, —

truth, realising the aerial structures of rehgion, and

Leaving general considerations, and coming to de-

doctrines, such as are still, I suppose, popularly held

are as remarkable for that which they contain as for

conviction that, when death takes place, a something

in absolute immortality; that such spirits can return

of spiritual existence known as Elohim, of whom

sistently with this view, Jahveh was conceived as a

childish fancies, appropriate to the infancy of civilisa-

tion and a age readily intelligi-

ble to the historian and student of folk-lore, but not